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Facebook launches new widgets for personal and business websites

September 4th, 2009

When I logged into my Facebook account today, I noticed they had added a new widgets section for personal websites. I’ve already add a sidebar widget on Cardeo, but it looks like they have gathered all the existing widgets, and some new ones, into one area. The new widget page can be found over at: facebook.com/facebook-widgets

Facebook Widgets for Personal Websites

Profile Badge
The profile badge allows you to share you profile info on other websites. You could insert it into the footer of your personal website to direct people to your Facebook profile.

Photo Badge
The photo badge widget allows you to display photos from your Facebook account on other websites. You could use it to create an image gallery on your personal website.

Page and Business Widgets

Fan Box
The fan box widget allows you to post a summary of your Facebook Page on another website. I’ve got one running on the Cardeo sidebar if you want to check it out. It displays your feed, number of fans, and a link to your page.

Live Stream Box
This is the newest widget and there appears to be some bugs in it that need to get worked out. It looks like it allows you to publically post your profile or page feed. However, the “other” option on where to post the widget, doesn’t seem to be working. It asks you to copy and paste some code, but no code appears.

Page Badges
The page badge is similar to the profile badge, except the summary of info is specific to the Facebook page you choose. You must be the owner of the page to make a widget for it.

I’m glad Facebook has put all this stuff under one umbrella, it will make it easier to keep up to date on new widgets. The one thing I’m curious about though is the privacy implications of some of these new widgets. Facebook was recently in hot water with the Canadian government, over their privacy policy. However, some of the features of these new widgets, like displaying photos publically, would seem to go against the agreement they made with Canada. We’ll have to see how this plays out eh!

Tags: badges, canada, facebook, privacy, widgets