At Facebook's third annual developer conference on April 21-22, 2010, they made some big announcements about expanding their presence outside of Facebook. By making available a series of social plug-ins, developers can now integrate Facebook feeds (activity, comments, etc.) directly into their own websites.

Probably the most talked about announcement was the change of the "Become a Fan" button to a simpler "Like" button and the expansion of this button to cover anything on the web. Rather than just liking (or becoming a fan) of Facebook pages, you can now 'like' any webpage outside of Facebook, as long as that website integrates the new Like button plug-in. In fact, Google have announced that their Chrome browser will have a Facebook Like button in the toolbar to allow you to 'like' webpages regardless of whether they have integrated the new plug-in.

The new Like button provides Facebook with social bookmarking funtionality that competes directly with Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites. Bookmarking has always been a good thing for small business websites who can't beat the big boys to the top of the search engine rankings; it allows them to be quickly returned to and found more easily by other like-minded people. As Facebook is the largest social network by far, this introduction opens up social bookmarking to a much wider audience.

At Woolvey we like the Like button and have integrated it within all our product and article pages. If you read one of our articles and like it, including this one, please click the Like button below. Similarly, if you see a product on our site that you like, again click the Like button. This will add an entry to your Facebook wall showing your Facebook friends (as determined by your security settings) that you like something on our website.

©2010 Woolvey LLC