Facebook connect your website

Facebook connect has evolved as an important tool for increasing traffic and user engagement for websites. What is Facebook Connect? Facebook Connect is a free API for websites, desktop applications and iPhone, which facilitates users to easily share your content and the actions users take on your site with their friends on Facebook. With Facebook Connect APIs you can gain access to

• Identity: a user’s name, photos, and more.
• Friends: data about a user’s friends.
• Distribution: all of the integration points within Facebook, like stream stories and notifications.
• Integration: profile boxes, profile tabs, and publishers just like apps on Facebook

What is the work involved in implementing Facebook connect? Technical integration of Facebook Connect with your website is a breeze. However, creativity and effort will be required to enable a more social and engaging experience on your site, that can effectively use the viral channels and the data about users and their friends. Before you hit the trail on connecting your website with Facebook, it is useful to understand the integration points. 1. Identity and Access - Use Facebook Connect functionality as a login mechanism for the users of your website. Facebook APIs provide you access to users name, photos, data about a user's friends etc. You can chose to store or not store user data in your database. For more information refer to Authentication and Authorization. 2. User's wall - One of the coolest benifit of Facebook Connect is the ability for your site to publish stories to your users' Wall and News Feed (of his/her facebook profile). These stories describe some activity the users took on your site.. These stories can contain text and multimedia elements such as images, videos, mp3s and flash elements, thereby providing you a powerful platform for reaching out to all the friends of a user and a mechanism for increased user engagement. More information on streams API here. 3. Notifications - Facebook Connect provides you the ability to send emails and notifications to the friends of a user. For example, if the user starts a discussion in a forum, or wins a game, or expresses liking for a video or an image a notification can be sent to all his/her friends, which in turn will help bring them to your site. 4. Profile boxes and Profile tabs - Your application can install a profile box or profile tab on users profile, which serves as a free promotional space for your application. 5. SQL Style access - You can query the facebook social data such as user details, friends lists, notifications, inbox, events, wall posts using a SQL style interface called FQL (facebook query language). The same information however is available through complementary APIs. However you would use FQL for flexibility and performance reasons. Where do I start? 1. Start with the Introduction to Facebook Connect. 2. Have your development team familiarize with the API 3. Refer to some of the websites that have implemented Facebook Connect. 4. Work on redesigning parts of your website to enable better social and engaging experience that utilizes the viral channels provided by Facebook Connect API. 5. Evaluate the technical choices available for integration - XFBML, Javascript Client Libraries or Server Side REST libraries. Ofcourse, you can intermix the three approaches on your site. Finally there are several open source libraries available to further simplify your integration task. Once you are ready for integration, you can make an appropriate choice depending on your applicaton platform (php, java, ror) and the requirement specifications. We will examine the implementation choices and some best practices in another post to follow. Thanks Sanjeev