For a social site that is into sharing, it sure has taken Facebook a long enough time to embrace widgets. Sure, they launched a Fan Box widget back in July for companies and celebs with a Facebook Page, and a few other widgets before that. But how many peopel actually used them? Now, Facebook has a new widget center that brings them all together.
There are five widgets in all: a profile badge, a photo badge to share your Facebook photos elsewhere on the web, a Stream Box to share your stream, the aforementioned Fan Box, and a related Facebook Page badge. Like other widgets, you can embed these on your blog or elsewhere.
The live stream widget, of course, is my favorite. You can see what it looks like at right. There is an everyone tab and a Friends tab. The Friends tab is hwat I actually see in my stream when I log into Facebook. Now I can embed that stream anywhere and expose my view of my friends’ ramblings to a wider audience. In addition to reading the stream, you can comment and add likes to items from within the widget.
At least that is what it lets you do in the preview. I had trouble embedding the widgets in this post, which is why I resorted to screenshots except for the TechCrunch Page badge below (but that could just be an issue with the way we have WordPress set up on our site):
TechCrunch
Promote Your Page Too
And this is what the TechCrunch Fan Box looks like:
There’s something up with these widgets of theirs…I can’t get them to work on many sites of mine. This is what I see here for example: http://stash.ze...%2003:11:11.png
How did you fix it?
I didn’t. I took a screenshot of the preview on Facebook. Only the badge is live.
Can anyone get these widgets to work?
Maybe they took a different turn (away from do now and deal with the uproar later) and possibly they were having issues with the privacy settings for members in the livestream box for things such as the “friends” tab and decided to turn off embedding so they could address it.
Awaiting for Facebook! After a long enough time Facebook has embraced the widgets. It has a new widget center that brings them all together. Five different types of widgets are introduced,they are a profile badge, a photo badge, a Stream Box to share your stream, the aforementioned Fan Box, and a related Facebook Page badge. Even though they are same to other sites,widgets look different.
Maybe they look different and possibly they are having certain issues with the privacy settings!
They work fine on me http://www.hipervinculo.net the fan box is at the lower right
Nice that Facebook opened a Widget Center for all users. Now this feature adds up more entertainment with more sharing. Cool. This would be still great if Facebook improves strict security policies as it is making open system.
In my blog, which uses wordpress platform, I found that the best way to embed a fan box is to set a custom width according to your blog them. You can change the width simply by changing the value in the code that you copy to your site from facebook.
Check how it works at http://mymediaexperience.com
>Now I can embed that stream anywhere and expose my view of my friends’ ramblings to a wider audience.
And how do you friends feel about that? I really hope they have some mad privacy settings going on (I.e. I can only see updates from shared friends).
Some of us LIKE the walls around the garden. Otherwise, I’d only be on twitter.
Let me just point out that there’s a huge misnomer in here, when people refer to facebook and “the walled garden”, it’s not to indicate that your privacy is protected. Instead what it refers to is being ‘locked into the walled garden’.
The social custodians (social sites, contact lists, etc) can protect your privacy while also offering open protocols (OpenSocial, PortableContacts, etc) with which you can do something useful with that data outside of their site.
So please, don’t think that the walled garden is to protect you, it’s not.. you can have a walled garden that still exposes all your private information, and it really isn’t a good thing
I too stumbled upon the facebook-widget page yesterday but couldn’t get live-stream to work (it didn’t show any code to copy).
Also, live-stream is supposed to work only for fanpages as the second page for live-stream asks you to ’select your application’ which in turns lists the pages I own.
You spelled people “peopel” in the first paragraph.
I must be the only one who finds it scary the way Facebook has control over all of your information–just wait until they start selling it when they can’t figure out a way to monetize their service and their investors want their money back, that’ll be even scarier.
It’s also possible that the risk of loosing its users caused by privacy “faux-pas” entices facebook to protect this privacy. They could also reached such a level of granularity regarding what one may publish online that no other site would match on time to compete. That being said, the raw data is benign from a privacy point of view when compared to the new informative data induced from it by 3rd party API access. It could then evolve as a privacy internal policy that could not be enforced for outside apps with less to loose.
I think you haven’t ever heard about Twitter, where privacy is no where
btw great widgets
I have heard of Twitter, and have a Twitter account, but the difference with Twitter is that you know going into it that it’s an open community..Facebook started off as a private community and is now changing from it was at the core, trying to be more Twitteresque (probably due to pressure from investors). You also don’t share nearly as much information on Twitter than you do on Facebook…Twitter you share a brief paragraph, Facebook for most people has their entire life’s events, including videos, pictures, and everything else under the sun. Twitter is more open, but it’s also less personal, it’s more of a marketing tool than anything else, which is why I feel more secure using Twitter than I ever have using Facebook.
You think Facebook cares what it’s users think? I remember reading an article awhile ago about a change they made to the homepage (and the users didn’t like it) and it was something like the lead developer saying “They’ll get over it, eventually” That kind of attitude is going to land them in a bad place, can’t wait to see it all go down.
It sounds like the widget concepts were half-baked so they had to back off until they get everything together. For example, the live stream feed with the friends tab as you described in your blog post violates Facebook’s privacy regime. Assume I have a privacy setting that permits only friends to see my posts. Assume you are a friend and can see my posts. The live feed widget (as described in this post) would allow you to publicize your private stream. Now things that I wanted only you to see would be available wherever and to whomever you deem appropriate. This violates the express intent of my privacy settings. I can’t imagine Facebook wants to make this possible.
It sounds like the widget concepts were half-baked so they had to back off until they get everything together. For example, the live stream feed with the friends tab as you described in your blog post violates Facebook’s privacy regime. Assume I have a privacy setting that permits only friends to see my posts. Assume you are a friend and can see my posts. The live feed widget (as described in this post) would allow you to publicize your private stream. Now things that I wanted only you to see would be available wherever and to whomever you deem appropriate. This violates the express intent of my privacy settings. I can’t imagine Facebook wants to make this possible.
Use iframe, you have a problem with the javascript because you use FaceBook connect
PAGE_NAME on Facebook
Embed your FaceBook widget in your tweet http://t.mirpod.com/p/266
More widgets
very cool apps!
rcm
Semi Green Blog
Facebook is losing popularity so they are trying to add many new features to get back in speed. They tried to purchase twitter against stock in facebook and twitter declined their offer.
losing popularity? What planet are you on?
The live streaming widget seems to only be available for fan pages, which are already public to the 250 million facebook users. I see no harm in letting a few million more eyeballs see the comments that I post to my favorite facebook page. The widget’s benefit is that it allows businesses, nonprofits, and bloggers better integration between their web page and their facebook page.
Widgets man, whod’a thunk?
I have had the standard widget on my blog for ages, would like to replace with the real-time status update version!
I think the Live Stream widget is supposed to be used in conjunction with a livestreaming video feed. (Hence why they are using the term “Stream” and not “Feed”, perhaps).
Also, because of this it might only work with Pages (as opposed to personal profiles)… And this widget has been around for a while, I believe…
How to get the widget to be dynamically added into a website? I have the livestream widget working on my website but this embedding is static in nature. How do I get this added dynamically by asking the user to enter the FB id? Does anybody know how to dot it?
MedGoline Team
Great news for all the members of face-book. The only thing think I request to them, is to increase the privacy protection level of the members…
So does this mean that if my mate has a widget on his website my status updates shared among ‘friends’ is now on his site for all wwweirdos to see?
Young users may like the widgets.
Youngsters are crazy behind Facebook. This social networking site is very much famous. I agree, the live stream widget is the best. The young crowd will definitely love all the new widgets and communicating through Facebook will be fun.
Facebook is a brilliant social networking site and this widget is kool. But the downside is that Facebook is very slow in response and crashes very often
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I’m not that fond of the Facebook widgets. Crowds your website with crazy stuff like
John Doe IS …showering naked *
Jane Doe WISHES ….this headache would go away*
Jim Bob Doe ATE all his peas and carrots*
Wilma Doe IS going to sleep*
*based on actual messages I’ve received before from friends on Facebook
…needless to say I deleted my account
Weakest photo widget ever. These are badges. Badges pretty much suck compared to fully functional widgets.