What's New at Linked In Design

Social Media

Many businesses already have a Facebook presence. With over 400 million users, Facebook is showing that it will keep growing, despite all of the recent privacy concerns capturing the media's attention. More and more sites across the web continue to get integrated with Facebook, which means Facebook is becoming more and more integrated into people's online activity in general.

Facebook made some interesting announcements at its F8 developer conference on April 21, 2010. The vision articulated by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Bret Taylor, formerly of Google and Friend Feed (acquired by Facebook), is of a more social internet, where relationships between people and things replace links between pages. The vision represents a shift from a Google-centric internet comprised of billions of unrelated documents and sites to a Facebook-centric one where social relationships and affiliations are the connective tissue in a vast network.

The "Like" Button

At the conference, Facebook formally announced social plugins. There are three social plugins: Like, Activity and Recommendations plug ins. The most important of these is the Like button. This was widely anticipated.

Publishers and developers can add a Like button to any page on any site. Adding that button effectively turns it into a Facebook fan page.

Here's the official description: "[The] Like button offers users a lightweight and consistent way to share the things and topics that interest them." For example Yelp, one of the launch partners, is adding a Like button to every local business profile page.

By clicking "Like" (and being logged into Facebook) you transmit that you like a business, in this case, back to your profile and feed. But you might equally Like a band (on Pandora) or Like a news story (on CNN) or a movie (on IMDB). Those Likes become part of your identity and in turn part of the data available to other publishers and sites in the "Open Graph" that Facebook envisions.

In the future all that public identity information, including Likes, will become available to Bing and maybe Google. Likes will also be enshrined in a specific area on your Facebook profile.

Linked In Design can assist you in setting up your Facebook page and in adding links and plugins to your website.