While Facebook is currently getting some negative press over privacy concerns, it is still the second most visited site in the US. An estimated 137 million people visit Facebook each month, that’s about 45% of the US population. Any content producer simply can’t ignore the impact of such a massive audience and should assume that a significant portion their traffic is using Facebook.

The easiest way to start distributing your content on Facebook is to use one of the two iframe or javascript based technologies. These require very little development experience and will have your content shareable in no time.

Share Widget

This method requires only a single line of code to share the current page. This is very handy when you have a large site and you simply want to add an easy way for visitors to share your site with their network. Using the configuration tool, you can customize the look at feel to best suit your design. If you use the “link” method, you can also change the text to read whatever you wish, for example, “Share on Facebook”. You can also add a counter to include total number of times your content has been shared. However, on relatively low traffic sites, you may opt to simply make the sharing process easier. Nobody wants to be the first to share something.

This is the easiest way to get your content into the newsfeed. Facebook will parse the page that is being referenced and set a title, description and any related images automatically leaving the user to press “share” in the popup window that is generated. To use multiple shares on the same page, simply add a “share_url=” parameter to the link. The parameter you add here, should be a unique landing page that a visitor would get the intended content from. This is how AF-Design is generating the buttons beside article titles. The line breaks in the example code below are not necessary and are only included for clarity.

<a name="fb_share" 
      type="icon_link" 
      href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" 
      type="text/javascript"></script>

Clicking on these shares generates a feed story like the one below.

Once you have completed this, be sure to read the section below on Good Meta Data. Now that you have made it easy for people to share your content, make sure you put your best face forward.

Like Button

The like button is a little bit more involved and may require more effort to enable on your site but it’s well worth the investment in time. The like button not only brings in the content, but if you fully adopt the open graph protocol for marking up your data, it will provide wider distribution in the long term. It’s still uncertain just how wide the additional semantic markup will spread your content, but with Facebook’s mass behind it, it’s certain to go far. It is likely, at some future date, the additional markup will be used by search engines and other content discovery tools.

If you are already using Facebook Connect, you can add a like button with a single line of XFBML. Since the premise of this post is that you need help getting started with your Facebook integration, we’re explaining the iframe approach. Facebook’s like tool provides you with a resource to configure the like button. Options include adding photographs, names and counters. On this site, the like button includes your friends who are engaged with the content, as well as a counter of engagement. You can see it in action, just above the comments below.

Another advantage of the like button, is if enough people “like” something, Facebook tends to elevate it in the newsfeed increasing distribution of your content.

This is how to create a properly escaped URL for each page, using PHP. The subsequent iframe includes the like button which you can then place on any page of your site.

<?php $like_url = urlencode('http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php print $like_url ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;font&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:80px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

Remember, regardless of how you create the URL, be sure it is escaped before generating the iframe code. When someone clicks on the like button, it will generate a network update like this on your profile.

Good Meta Data

Even if you choose not to implement one of the above strategies, it’s always important to have good accurate meta-data on your site. Facebook uses this meta-data when people share URL’s from the publisher. Facebook scans your page and provides to the user, whatever content it thinks is best. Providing good accurate meta-data for each page of your site is the best way to set those values.

Facebook supports an extended tag set to allow for direct embedding of audio, video and images directly into the newsfeed. It is likely these tags will change as the Open Graph protocol becomes more standardized, Facebook will continue supporting this for some time afterwards. Don’t use the impending changes as a reason to put off updating your meta-data, getting your information organized now will provide a leg up on your competition later.

I’ve always been a huge fan of desktop software. It allows developers to create a unique experience specifically tailored to a specific task. It promotes consistency within the OS, always knowing that the close window button is in the same location is a huge boon to usability. It’s generally faster and can work where your internet connection doesn’t. Last but not least, you have that copy on your hard drive that you can backup, put on a thumb drive or even print out as a hex dump if your so inclined.

Lately it seems though that, more and more of the software I use on a daily basis is heavily reliant on it’s client client connecting to the real back end over the internet. Email, instant messaging, Skype and web based documents are quickly being the primary conduit for my communication with clients. Add in the dizzying array of Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr and suddenly there are a lot of different ways to get a hold of me, none of which are dependent on my desktop software. The dark side of this cloud based interaction is that I don’t have a nice easy way to interact – a single touchpoint, like email, that I can be part of the conversation.

Enter Raindrop, it is an amazing new project from Mozilla Labs that promises to make email relevant again. In addition to email, it will bring in all of my conversation channels into one place, becoming a communication hub for me. This software is hugely exciting, taming the communication channels in a way that Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop can only dream of, while keeping all the information I gather in once central location. If this project ever launches and does only 1/2 of what it says it will do, it’s going to be awesome!

Today, TechCrunch posted an article about a new project called Inbox2. This project is web based and even has a Facebook application. It also promises to tame your communication environment! While the Raindrop application will definitely rock, it can’t touch the flexibility that the web version can reach. Raindrop is doomed because all of the data it’s taming is online, it only makes sense to build the application online as well.

This brings me to my original question, is desktop software dead? Google’s new Chrome OS is betting it is. In my experience, many software applications and iPhone apps are little more than a thin wrapper around a series of web services and API calls. Even when they’re not, like Pages or Word, I’m usually going to share it with a client via email, so why not write it in Google Docs to begin with? Obviously, the line is already blurring. As a developer, it seems easier to me to prototype an application in just about any web language and just simply run it in a browser window than it is to build a client for each device, iPhone, Mac, PC, Andriod, Linux you get the idea…

What do you think, is the end here for the Desktop Software market?

It seems Facebook is now showing re-tweets in a new way for some users, myself included. Instead of showing the person who re-tweeted, it’s now showing the original poster. Interesting way to give credit where credit is due.

This is the explanation.

And an example from my feed.

And a nice tabbed interface showing popular tweets and who’s retweeting them.

I’m noticing an increasing number of blogs are no longer providing links with a commenters name. While in itself a downside for folks trying to make themselves known through commenting, it does seem a good way to cut down on spam. A tip for folks looking to self promote through commenting, be sure to add a brand to your username and have good content to link to.

Looking at sites and tools like Earth, FreeBase, MediaWiki and DBpedia for inspiration, clarity and vision. Would love to hear about any other sites people have played with that provide wiki like front ends to structured data.

This last year I’ve become increasingly aware of smallish media companies, one or two employees, that seem to be trying to eek out a living by simply commenting on social media trends, this blog occasionally included. I’m not sure how much of this is due to new companies sprouting up or just my own awareness and understanding of the marketspace. The question for me becomes how many sources can cover the same news? Main stream media often takes a bias slant on stories, covering politics or other topics from a conservative, liberal, centrist, libertarian or whatever slant. The coverage of the social media space is far to narrow and doesn’t often lead to differentiation based on ideologies.

Regardless, I think we’re reaching gluttonous proportions and are in danger of becoming an echo chamber, described by Shel Isreal and Robert Scoble in Naked Conversations. Social media is definitely a huge portion of the future technology scene right now and it deserves coverage – but I think we’re covering it too much. I’m watching multiple blogs cover the same news within a few minutes of each other and that’s the part that scares me.

Consider the following post from Facebook about birthday notifications. It was picked up by Inside Facebook with commentary on how it may impact applications providing similar services as did TechCrunch and allfacebook. The saddest part is that none of them are adding additional value. None of the coverage is ground breaking or adds any real value to the experience.

Want more proof? When the fbFund winners were announced it was picked up by nearly every site covering Facebook news. This is actually news worthy, thousands of dollars are being given away! However, with coverage like FaceReviews near regurgitation of Facebook’s announcement and list of winners, I’d say we’re in danger of becoming spam sites. Thankfully some sites are actually reporting on the apps and adding value to the conversation.

I suspect we’ll be seeing consolidation of these blogs soon as those sites that add value stay afloat in troubling times and the others either switch focus to their real strengths or wither and die.

Taming the Beast has a nice primer on HTTP 301 redirects. I spent some time this morning cleaning up AF-Design’s internal issues after reading over the HubSpot Website Grader report. If you manage a website and haven’t already done so – consider running the free report. It takes only a few minutes to generate and read and most problems can be fixed in only a few additional minutes. You can get a handy dynamic badge too, which you can put on your internal monitoring tools to keep tabs on things.

Website Grader Score Badge Screenshot

The real takeaway on this article for me was swapping all references of www.af-design.com to just af-design.com. WordPress was already handling this for all blog entries, but the remaining sections of the site were still being referenced with the “www.” prefix. The additional lines for the .htaccess file are provided below for reference.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.af-design.com [NC]            
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://af-design.com/$1 [L,R=301]

NewsGang posted this tonight, it’s been picked up on CrunchGear as well – the long awaited Silverlight Watch Instantly, available to PC’s for a long time, is now in beta!

Thanks Netflix!

– Update: 9:10pm

Apparently Netflix has been harder at work than I had realized! Netflix will be offering TiVo subscribers access in December – W00t! Amazon may have gotten there first, but the UnBox – Video on Demand offering hasn’t impressed me.

The amount of data available of publicly online is astounding. The US Government has done a pretty good job of providing detailed data to it’s citizens on pretty much anything they keep tabs on. The census data immediately comes to mind, but there is much much more if you take the time to look for it. I stumbled across the USASearch.gov search engine while looking for some population data for cities. The search engine is not as accurate as Google unless you know the government lingo for your data, but it’s pretty good. I suspect there’s a data set there somewhere that would enhance any businesses results and the only cost to you is figuring out how it applies to what you do.

I’ve been doing some research over the last few days and have found that niche search is far from solved. Many market verticals are lacking an effective aggregator for timely content. The tools everyone needs are known, but they haven’t been implemented. Instead of true solutions, we find scraping sites that just suck in content and spit it out un-validated, unverified and unorganized. Because of the high costs of building robust tools, what results is a poor, incomplete collection of information, which quickly becomes stale.

That coupled with inaccurate supporting information, primarily due to high data-set costs, provides a less than desirable experience for users. Mahalo saw this in the generalized search market and put into place human editors who comb the internet looking for the best information and vetting user submissions. The result are guides of information that are informative and helpful.

How long will it be before we see Mahalo style sites targeting niche verticals? Who out there is working on a white label Mahalo which can be reused in these smaller markets?