At the F8 Conference on 21 April Facebook announced some major changes to their popular social media platform.
Facebook announced the roll out of their social plugins. Social pugins are simple tools that give users instant personalisation using an iFrame and a cookie on third party sites. If you are logged into your Facebook account and visit a Web site you will see which friends have also logged in there, what their activity is and a set of recommendations based on their actions.
There are three social plugin actions that a Facebook user can take. The first is a ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button, the second is an Activity Feed to see what other Facebook fiends are liking, commenting on or sharing and thirdly Recommendations which are the most liked content amongst your friends.
Social plugins will appear as buttons and boxes on third party sites and you will need to be logged in to Facebook to use these buttons. The area on the third party site is effectively a small space set aside for the use of Facebook and the information there is in control of Facebook. None of the information there is shared with the third party site.
By liking something this information will appear on your Facebook page and may become part of your profile. Likes and recommendations are public information as if you have commented on a public Facebook Page. The “Like” button, Activity Feed and Recommendations only display your friends’ names and profile pictures and to show the likes and recommendations from people who aren’t your friends in an aggregated format (“15 people like this”).
Some third party sites will be allowed to take this ability even further, showing users personalised content based on the details of their public profile on Facebook.The company will be able to read and interpret that content without asking users. At the moment, only three sites have this extra ability, which Facebook calls “instant personalization”—they are Docs.com (an online document-hosting and editing site from Microsoft), the music site Pandora, and the review site Yelp.
As with previous Facebook changes this has caused a great deal of comment and some users have deleted their Facebook accounts.