Facebook® Advertising For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Extending the Facebook Experience

In This Chapter

• Getting to know Facebook plug-ins

• Understanding the benefits of Facebook plug-ins

• Adding a Facebook plug-in to your own Web site

• Explaining the various Facebook plug-ins

Every year, Facebook holds a conference with its application developer community called F8. At the 2010 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg summed up many of Facebook's goals for their Web site in one sentence: "We are building a Web where the default is social." That conference was where Facebook launched its Open Graph initiative, which is a program designed for developers to add "hooks" or connections between Facebook, other popular Web site destinations, and regular Web sites that want to offer more content to their users.

In other words, the Open Graph initiative makes it easier for Web site developers to see social network connections between people, as well as those people's online interests. For example, special interest Web sites like Yelp use the Facebook Like button to capture information about users' favorite restaurants (based on Yelp reviews, for instance) and can use that information when trying to present new reviews. A movie Web site like Netflix or redbox can help record users' favorite movies based on their preferences and can use that information to recommend similar movies.

For online businesses, this means you can extend the Facebook experience to your own Web site so that hundreds of millions of users on your site can interact with ...