In the wake of Facebook’s launch of the Facebook for Web Sites platform and the recent changes regarding privacy controls, the Demand Media team has been hard at work determining how to best integrate and leverage the new Facebook technology in the Pluck platform. Facebook’s new platform has re-energized an ongoing debate about privacy and yesterday Facebook responded by simplifying user’s control of privacy around their data inside and outside of Facebook. We believe this was the right move by Facebook. As we endeavor to build integrations with Facebook’s new technology and privacy settings, a paramount design goal is to ensure that the user is in complete control of when they use their Facebook account to participate socially on our customers’ sites. We believe the user should always have the choice between participation using a known identity (e.g. Facebook Profile) or a digital disguise.

As most of you know, we were an inaugural Facebook Connect launch partner and view their offering as revolutionary today as it was in 2006. Facebook’s technology validated our conviction that our customers can benefit from seamless two-way bridges to the Web’s large social destinations. Last year we expanded our Social Bridging capability to embrace Twitter and this year we added support for LinkedIn. Our existing Social Bridging architecture, and the thinking that drove that architecture, is guiding our current integration effort with Facebook. Our integration plans cover three primary dimensions of Social Bridging – Identity, Relationships, and Activity. 

Identity

Today, most active web users have already defined an identity on an existing social destination like Facebook. A user’s online identity is their way of introducing and identifying themselves to others. Many users want the option to reuse an identity they have already established; others, for any number of reasons, prefer to build a new identity at a given destination.

We believe that either option should always be open to users.  Facebook for Websites makes it easier than ever to allow a user to leverage their Facebook identity in Pluck-powered conversations. We plan to leverage these new capabilities in Pluck in the following ways:

1.      We are extending our Pluck 4 Comments application to allow users already logged into Facebook to comment without logging in again on a Pluck customer’s site. The user will simply be given an option to comment using their Facebook identity. If the user chooses to do so, we will ask them to authorize our Facebook application and we will only leverage the user’s public Facebook information (name and profile picture) to create and populate the user’s default Pluck Persona.

2.      We are leveraging our Rewards system to automatically grant a Facebook badge to any user that comments using their Facebook identity. This allows our customers to recognize these users as “verified” because they are using their real identity, and filter their comments at the top of the comment stream as “Featured Commenters”.

Relationships

People spend their entire lives building relationships with other people. Our online lives, like our offline lives, are rich with relationships fostered via email, social networking tools, and other platforms. Yet when a user arrives at a new site, it is not immediately obvious to them if their friends are there.  Though a user may have hundreds of digital relationships in Facebook, when they participate outside of Facebook their experiences are divested of those relationships, even though their friends may be visiting and participating on the very same social sites.

Facebook for Websites makes it easy for users to discover which of their Facebook friends are participants on our customers’ sites. We plan to leverage these new capabilities in the Pluck platform in the following ways:

1.      We are extending the Pluck 4 Persona application to allow a user to immediately discover Facebook friends already participating on our customer’s site, and friend or follow them locally there. This gives new users an instant social network.

2.      Once a user is connected with their Facebook friends they can immediately begin to filter their comment-driven conversations by what their friends are saying, and see all their Facebook friends’ activity from within our customer’s site in their Pluck 4 Persona Friend Feed.

Activity

Social activity has exploded online, with time spent on social networks growing at 3x the overall Internet rate. The result is an avalanche of user-generated content – comments, forum posts, photos, videos, ratings, and reviews – on both social destinations like Facebook and our customers’ social sites. Despite the broader value and appeal some of this content may have, most user contributions never escape the boundaries of the site where they originated. We believe that content needs to be as “free” to traverse site boundaries as identities and relationships, especially when it’s content on our customers’ sites that they want to promote across the Web.

We were early to this game in 2008 when we gave visitors to our customers’ sites the ability to share their social interactions – their comments, for example – on Facebook.  Facebook for Websites and the new Open Graph provide us with the means to do even more. We plan to leverage Facebook’s added capabilities to create a new Pluck 4 Recommendations application. The Pluck app will build upon the new “Like” button from Facebook. It will add support for anonymous recommendations. Importantly, it will also record all ‘likes’ locally, powering Pluck discovery on our customers’ sites. And, the ‘likes’ sent back to Facebook will drive traffic and attention in a viral way back to our customers.

Conclusion

Facebook for Websites offers great potential for driving increased engagement and social interaction on our customers’ sites. We are focused on integrating these capabilities into our Pluck platform, and we are confident that the benefits to our customers and their users will be tremendous. As we build this integration we are driven to put end-users’ options first, to ensure that they are always in control of their Facebook identity and their interactions as they participate socially on a customer’s site. We are excited about this integration and we will continue to keep our community apprised of our progress.