Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Turning Your Web Site into a Social Experience

You've identified your user, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. After all, how can a social network be “social” if it's all about just the individual? You can't be social unless you bring a person's friends into the picture, and the Facebook API makes that really easy.

With Facebook API, you not only can bring your user's information to your Web site, but you can also bring all that user's friends and those friends' information as well. This enables you, with just one click, to automatically have a social experience right out of the box on your own Web site.

Here's a sample “social experience,” assuming that you have a blog, and how it could work on your Web site:

1. The user logs in to your blog (if the user is already logged in, it moves to Step 2).
2. Now, whenever the user visits your blog, rather than seeing a chronological view, immediately the user sees what her friends are reading, and it gets sorted by the most-read and -shared articles on the site, providing a much more interesting experience for the user. HuffingtonPost.com, for example, creates a social experience for users on social networks by presenting all their articles in a view sorted by what their readers' friends are reading. (See Figure 7-7.)
3. For each article that the user reads, he or she can see similar articles that his or her friends have read.
4. Users can share each article to Facebook with their friends. Friends can comment on the article on Facebook or on ...