Facebook Connect 5 Things You Wish You Had Known Before You Started

FB connect 5 things you wish you’d known before you started Toby Beresford Facebook Developer Garage London 11 Feb 2009 With a bit of help from LOLCATS

What is it

Simple: With a single sign-on process, users can easily log in to your site and Facebook using the same account.

Social: Integrate your users' Facebook social graphs with their social graphs on your site to provide better content with a social context.

Seamless: Publish the actions users take on your site on Facebook.

Synchronized: Keep your users' personal and friend data in sync with Facebook.

Making it work

There’s loads of info on the Facebook Developers Wiki

There are lots of plugins already Joomla, Wiki, Wordpress, Vbulletin

Dave Morin did a nice vid on how to set up Facebook Connect in 8 minutes

1 – It makes your site better

1. Facebook Connect adds value to your site

2 – dude, where’s my data

2. Facebook Connect steals value from your site

No email capture

No name capture

Harder user communications

Facebook users share with Facebook friends first

3 – Think before you act

3. Deep site changes are required to show off Facebook friend activity

I’m REALLY interested in friends who have visited your site and added content – tell me about them

4 – Cool by Association

4. You’re now co-marketing Facebook

This is a good thing. Facebook is a super brand - don’t be ashamed to brag about your link – Intel Inside etc. Most of your users who aren’t on Facebook yet think they ought to be.

5 – Copycat

5. Copy what others have done