Facebook Social Plugins | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Social Plugins

developers.facebook.com

I'm not sure how I feel about content being tailored based on my social graph's likes. In some cases it could be good, in others not so much. My friends list on facebook has enough of people from my small town high school days thanks to our upcoming 10 year reunion, and believe me -- we have nothing in common. Maybe I'm being cynical but I loved the internet when you sought new and exciting things without the group think.

I've been thinking along similar lines lately. I only care about what a few of my Facebook 'friends' like, think, do, etc., and I talk to them in real life. If it weren't for the social noise that is Facebook, I think I would have made a few more meaningful relationships like that in college. Friendship has been hijacked by acquaintanceship.

I was just talking about this with my friends. It really needs to integrate with friend lists in some way. Ideally, there would be a way to "devalue" a friend so their activity isn't as highly valued as other friends you have. Even more ideally, this information could be filtered automatically through a learning algorithm that increases the value of recommendations from friends you match closely. That would avoid a UI nightmare of trying to get everyone on Facebook to basically rank their friends in terms of value of their opinions.

The algorithm would need to be pretty smart though, for example I have friends who I'd trust to the end's of the earth on everything except for music, we have violently different tastes and no ability to recommend music to each other.

yes, you would need "liks" tagged with subjects. I do want to hear about physics links from friend Bob, but also ban any link about politics/religion.

It will be super easy for facebook to make the distinction between all your fb friends and the special friends you care/share things with. They already do this for the newsfeed.

Indeed it would be if there was a value associated to a filter, as it stands it's just a filter with an ambiguous name. I do wish the filters were easier to use, at least accessible with one click instead of buried away.

So - I watched the keynote (http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/) and I have a few questions.

If I like a movie on IMDB am I liking the movie itself or just that particular movie's page on IMDB? (see video at 23:28) I would assume I am liking the movie, but it's unclear. Does this mean that IMDB now controls all movies on Facebook, or can I like it on flixster as well? If I like it on Flixster will it be represented separately on Facebook than when I liked it on IMDB?

This get's even more confusing when you introduce real people. For instance, if I like Toby Gerhart on ESPN am I liking him or ESPN (See video at 25:00). The status update Bret shows on a slide after liking Toby shows a status update coming from Toby Gerhart himself. What if Toby does not have a Facebookpage?

This seems very cool - but it seems like there are a lot of holes. Maybe I dont fully understand it. Can anyone clarify?

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph

Thanks - that explains it well. As I understand it, anyone can set up objects for anything now and be the "voice" of that object. Seems crazy after all the trouble Facebook had with unofficial facebook pages.

And so it begins.... http://arnab.org/blog/deceiving-users-facebook-button

I think it's time for me to start running Facebook in a separate browser session. I'm sick of trying to keep track of the moving target of what Facebook will and won't leak to other sites.

As far as I can tell, this doesn't leak anything at all unless you authorize the site to access your information or click a Like button.

Except when your friends do. And except when it changes. I have lost count of how many times I have had to go in and rejig my privacy settings and how many times Facebook have very slightly reduced what you can stop from leaking out.

I feel like this move by Facebook is opening up a ton of new opportunities for phishing scams.

There are a lot of people who won't carefully check the address bar when, upon clicking something on a website which looks like a Facebook plugin, they are asked for their Facebook login information.

Already pinged one of my clients about integrating this into their online store. I think this looks awesome.

What I think this will allow us to do:

On each product page there will be a Like button (if you're logged into FB), which users will use accordingly. Then when a new user comes to the site they'll be able to browse all the products their friends have liked.

Privacy concerns aside, this is going to be great for business.

Indeed privacy concerns aside, but I completely agree. This will have a huge impact on the web, how can you pass up on 400M users (will probably be 1B in less than two years) and their data on your site? I love the idea of heading to amazon and get a list of movies I haven't seen that my friends which i share movie taste with have rated highly on IMDb. I mean, woha!

Regarding the privacy concern its merely a shift in what is private and what is not - this I think can not be stopped by now.

I agree, this is going to be great for social shopping apps.

Has anybody tried out the comments plugin? It seems to do almost the same thing as disqus, except it is tied more directly to Facebook, which could be a big win.

My friend at http://ewrestlingnews.com/ tried it out for a while and gave really good feedback on it. User engagement increased exponentially and I think he noticed a slight traffic bump too for those pages. Certainly worthwhile for the little code required to implement it.

Here is Facebook's blog post on these plugins: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/377

I would, but the facebook bar totally clashes with my Ask.com bar. And my Digg bar.

I get the feeling there are now some poor saps whose browsers resemble the flag of Sierra Leone (http://bit.ly/cDgS7A).

Not quite the same but many years ago I got bored and wanted to know how far the toolbar game could go: http://moot.mooh.org/archives/2005/02/super-toolbar.html

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