Adding A Google Buzz Share Button To Your WordPress Blog

There’s a great little tutorial over at savedelete.com on how to add a Google Buzz share button to your WordPress Blog.
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It’s getting easier to connect with Facebook

Facebook released a couple of great updates to the Facebook Connect program this week. The first was the announcement of a new translation tool that you can use on your own website. This could be big news for companies that operate international websites in multiple languages.

The second was the release of Facebook Playground, that aims to make it easier to add Connect widgets to your own website. You can now setup Facebook Connect in three easy steps with the Connect Wizard. Once you’re setup, you can add the following widgets to your website by cutting and pasting code snippets:

Facebook Connect Markup and Publishing

» Social Markup: Login Button, Profile Picture, Name, Friends
» Publishing to Facebook: Stream Publish

Facebook Connect Widgets

» Share Button
» Comments Box
» Fan Box
» Live Stream Box

I’ve implemented a number of the widgets over on my Vancouver Canucks blog if you’d like to check them out. I love how Facebook is making it easier and easier to add these new Connect features, keep them coming!

Facebook launches application prototypes

“Facebook’s engineers thrive on innovation and experimentation. We’re encouraged to work on projects that inspire us and build on new ideas, but not all of these features and improvements wind up launching on the site. In some instances, they’re not quite ready for prime time, are a bit esoteric or don’t quite fit. Now, for all the products that wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to see the light of day, we’re introducing Facebook Prototypes.

Facebook Prototypes let us share the experimentation going on inside the walls of Facebook with the rest of the world. You’ll be able to test any of the products and features we launch as Facebook Prototypes and then provide feedback directly to those of us who built them. To access Prototypes, visit the Application Directory and filter by “Prototypes.” From there, you can activate or download any of the Prototypes listed.”

» Read more about Prototypes on the Facebook Blog

» Check out some current prototype apps

Facebook launches new widgets for personal and business websites

facebook-widgets

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
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How to publish to Twitter from Facebook pages

Facebook released a new pages feature today that allows you to publish your page updates to Twitter! I’m stoked on this new feature, and have been hoping they would build it in. It’s very easy to activate it, just go to:

» facebook.com/twitter

Once you are there click on the link to Twitter button for your page. You’ll then be redirected to Twitter where you need to sign in and give Facebook access to update your account. After that, you’ll return to Facebook where you can pick what type of updates you want to publish on Twitter. The options include:

» Status Updates
» Photos
» Links
» Notes
» Events

To learn more about this new feature, check out the post on the Facebook Blog

» Follow Cardeo on Twitter

» Become a fan of Cardeo on Facebook

New Facebook page features

I’m not sure how new these features are, but I just noticed them today. Facebook Pages continue to get more and more powerful, and there are two new options worth checking out. First of all, head over to a Facebook Page – Why don’t you check out the Cardeo page if you haven’t already.

Once you arrive, check out the left-side subav and click on “more” to expand the full thing. From there you’ll see a couple of new options, one being “Suggest to Friend”, and the other is “Subscribe via SMS”.

Suggest to Friend

I’ve been wanting this feature forever! It sucked in the past because Facebook wouldn’t allow you to invite your friends to your page. You’ve always been allowed to do this with groups but not always with pages. I think it’s because they were pushing hard for page publishers to purchase ads to promote their pages. I’m glad the good people at Facebook have now come to their senses, and will allow us to invite our friends on our friends list. Another small thing about this option that is awesome is, when you are going through your list of friends to pick who you want to invite, it grays out friends that are already fans of your page. Nice attention to detail Facebook.

Subscribe Via SMS

The feature will allow your fans to subscribe to your page wall feed via SMS. This is a really nice little feature for allowing your fans to receive updates on their mobile devices. Why don’t you Subscribe to the Cardeo page updates to try it out?

Become a fan of Cardeo on Facebook

Hey, did you know that Cardeo is on Facebook? I’m trying to build up my fans there so I can get a vanity url. It would be much appreciated if you became a fan of Cardeo on Facebook. Bonus points, I regularly give away exclusive freebies to my fans on Facebook :)

» Become a fan of Cardeo on Facebook

Is it better to have a separate Twitter profile for your blog?

I’ve recently found myself in a bit of a pickle. I have my original Twitter profile @mlambert that I setup last year. I also have @cardeo, which I recently started feeding my blog posts, flickr updates, and delicious bookmarks too. Here’s my problem…

Is it better to have a separate Twitter profile my blog, or should I combine my personal profile with my blog profile?

As the readers of my blog, what would you prefer? Only blog related tweets, or a combination of blog stuff and more personal messages? I’d also love to hear from some other bloggers, and what they prefer to do for their own websites. Thanks

How to add a Facebook Fan Page widget to your website

Facebook recently added the ability to add a Fan Page widget to your website. For an example, check out the Cardeo sidebar, about half way down. Using javascript, or an iframe, makes adding this widget to your website pretty easy. For this tutorial, I’m going to use the javascript example.

You’ll need a Facebook API Key

First things first, you’re going to need to generate an API key for yourself. You can do that at the Getting Started page on the Facebook Developers website. You may have generated an API key already if you have setup an app in the past. If that is the case, it will remember your API key if you are logged into facebook.

Once you have setup the API key or logged in, head to the Fan Box page on the Facebook Developer Wiki. This page will give you detailed instruction around the Fan Box. If my explanation is not making sense, refer to this page for more info.

Creating the Fan Box

head over to the Facebook Page that you would like to create the Fan Box for. Once you get to the page, locate the “add fan box to your site” link, which appears under your Page Profile image. You’ll be transfered over to the Add a Connect Widget page where you can customize the Fan Box widget.

Customizing the Widget

1. If you have multiple pages, make sure the correct one is selected from the drop-down.

2. If you would like to display your wall stream in the widget, check the Include Stream box

3. If you would like to display your fans in the widget, check the Include Fans box

4. If you are familiar with FBML, you can do further customizations by clicking the advanced link

Once you’re done with your settings, you’ll see the javascript code that has been generated. Make sure the API key is displaying or it won’t work. If everything looks good, copy the code and paste it into your website code. Upload the updated html file and hit refresh, and that should do it.

Additional Customizations

A couple other customizations you can do are: editing the width of the widget, and editing the amount of fans that show up.

To edit the width, find the width attribute that is set to (width=”300″) by default. Simply change that width to whatever you want.

To change the number of fans that show up, locate the connections attribute that is set to (connections=”10″). The default is 10 fans, you can change that to whatever you want. However, I’d suggest not going over 10 as they may get cut off. Play around with it, if you increase the width of the widget, you could fit more than 10 fans. That’s it, time to start connecting with Facebook.

Facebook adding usernames this week

Facebook announced today that they will be adding user generated usernames this week on profiles and pages. What does this mean exactly? It means you will have a cleaner url to your profile and/or page(s). For example: www.facebook.com/mlambert

I’ve been waiting for this feature for a long time, and I’m glad to see they are adding it. The only complaint I have is that once you set your name, it is set for good. Twitter allows it’s users to change their name as many times as they like (assuming the new name is available). Perhaps there’s something on Facebook’s backend that makes the ability to change challenging, or maybe we will see that feature in the future.

As of Friday June 12th, at 9pm PST, you can set your username at: www.facebook.com/username.