Facebook is taking on a new dimension. While new developer tools are exciting, how many of understand the old tools. Trying to understand Facebook is a daunting task, and the orgranization of their site does not make it any easier. The announcement of the new social plug-ins was no different. The announcement appeared once, and then disappeared. After a bit of searching, I found a few interesting, and important pages.

First, a quick review of the different pages offered by Facebook.

• Profile Page is the page under the Profile tab. Any status message or notes are shown to your friends on their Home page. You have a limit of 5,000 friends and must approve each friend. Once you have a 100 friends, or provide SMS verification to a cell phone, you can get a shorter username for your profile page (for example, http://www.facebook.com/billsdesk).
• You can create a Group Page, which allows for open or closed groups. To be a member of a group, a user must have a Facebook account. The group cannot have its own URL, and there is no integration to a group page by any tools. The advantages are that the members of the group do not have to be friends. With the planned removal of groups from the info tab, groups become even more isolated.
• The Fan Page offers goes beyond the group page. By default, fan pages are public. While a fan must have a Facebook account, anyone can view a fan page. After a reaching 25 fans, you create a shorter username for each fan page at http://www.facebook.com/username. The username makes access to the fan page far easier. Like groups, you can have multiple fan pages attached to your profile page, and each fan page can have its own username.
• The new Community Pages are built, by Facebook, around topics, causes or experiences. You have no control over these pages. This is Facebooks attempt at semantic connections.

Every type of page is a unique entity, which means there is no mechanism within Facebook to post the same status message on a profile page and a fan page. The same applies for notes, discussions, and messages. This is where it becomes necessary to use a third party product such as HootSuite, Yono, or TweetDeck.

Like any company, Facebook guards its logos, as they are part of the company identity. Before using any Facebook logo outside of the Facebook site, you need to review the legal verbage and use the approved icons on the Brand Permissions Center page, which you can reach by clicking Account -> Help Center -> Brand Resource Center. It is better to follow the guidelines, than to receive a letter from Facebook's legal department.

Rather than separating "old" Facebook integration methods from the new social plugins. I am going to divide them into general connection categories. The key resource pages on Facebook are as follows:

• Facebook Widgets
• Facebook Social plugins

Linking to Profile Page

From the icons on the Brand Resource Center page, you can create an link back to your profile page using one of the approved icons as the image. For those who want more, you can also do the following:

• The Profile Badge allows you to configure a richer link to your profile page. By clicking the edit link, you can create a custom badge that links to your profile page.
• A Photo Badge provides a link to a Facebook profile photo album.

Linking to Fan Pages

Using one of the approved icons, you can create a link to a Facebook fan page. Using widgets and plugins, Facebook offers a richer interface:

• You can create a Like Badge for any page of which you are a fan.
• The Page Badge presents more information about a fan page, and can be customized.
• Going one step further, the Like Box social plugin displays status messages and pictures of fans on your Web site for a fan page. It provides a more dynamic means of attracting fans to your fan page from your Web site.

Linking Facebook to Your Site

Sometimes it is the simple things that are difficult to accomplish. For example, a link to your web site from your profile or fan page can only appear in one of the following ways.

• It is now only visible under the "Info" tab. For the profile page, the Web  site is in the Contact Information block. For a fan page, the URL for an external Web site is in the Detail Info section. Neither of these is exactly obvious.
• You can, and should, create an external Web site as a link under the Link tab. As you add more links, the link to your own site slide further down the list.
• You can keep visible by putting it in the who we are type block in the left margine. However, you cannot make it a clickable link.

A link to your fan page falls in the same trap, with the same solutions.

RSS and Facebook

RSS may lack the pizaz of the new technologies, but it works. There are two ways to use RSS with Facebook:

• If your site generates an RSS stream for content, then you can tie that steam into the Notes for your profile page. Unfortunately, Facebook does not provide a mechanism for tying fan page notes to an RSS stream. To drive traffic back to your site, I recommend that you only steam the teaster. An interested reader follow the link back to your site for the full article. The art is writing good teasers. Notes offer the advantage of both being longer and are less like to get buried in the noise of status messages. To connect Facebook to an RSS feed, click the Options link under the status message box, and then click settings.
• Both profile an fan Notes provide an outgoing RSS stream.  I know that WordPress and Drupal provide the necessary extensions for viewing these streams on your Web site. I am sure that other Blog and CMS software provide a similar extension.

Facebook User Sharing

User sharing involves sharing and commenting on your site to their friends. It also involves the more controversial plugins that who which of your friends have a connection to your site. This goes beyond fan pages to building communities of friends with shared experiences.

• The Share widget allows vistors of your site to share its content with their friends on Facebook. This widget depends on the Meta tags for the page the visitor wishes to share.
• As part of the new social plugins, the Like Button use the Open Graph protocol to provide information about your site. It also provides a single click link for Facebook users. This button does require some additional Meta tags for it to function. The Open Graph protocol is Facebook's entry into the world of the semantic web through the use of Meta tags. I am not sure why they didn't support one of the exsisting semantic vocabularies, such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).
• The Recommendations social plugin is similar to social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon or Delicious, but focused on Facebook visitors to your site. It essentialy says the Facebook community recommends these pages on your site.
• The Comments social plugin is a variation of the Like Button. Instead of semantic tagging, the Comments plugin shows the comments made about a particular piece of content, along with a Like icon and a comments box. The Comments plugin ties to any uniquely identifiable content, whether it be a Web page, article, photo, or other type of content. A consequence of social networking is that comments on any URI are scattered across multiple sites. Facebook is just one more site for comments. What we need is a comments aggregator.
• The Activity Feed social plugin combines Shares, Likes, and Recommendations into one stream. The documentation describes all the rules for aggregating content into this stream.
• The Live Stream social plugin works well with such as webinars, events, or any live event. It similar to Twitter streaming for a live event.

OpenID Facebook Style

Facebook does serve as an OpenID server, which allows you to use Facebook as an authentication mechanism for your site. The Facebook Connect API offers much more tighter connection between Facebook and your site. Some of the possibilities for using Facebook for authentication are:

• Facebook Connect Plugins exist for a wide variety of blogs, forum, browsers, and CMS extensions.
• Login with Faces takes the Facebook Connection one step further by showing pictures of the user's friends who have created an account with your site.
• The Facepile social plugin simply shows the friends who have already signed up for your site. This plugin applies to those sites that do not use OpenID or Facebook Connect for user authentication.

Summary

In my opinion, Facebook wants to become one of the super social network sites. They want to play with Google and Yahoo in terms of the range of features. They are copting services offered by social bookmarking sites to match what Google and Yahoo offer. Like Google and Yahoo, it is getting harder to understand track down detailed information on all of the services. While the number of social networking features increase, there are still basic gaps like permanently visible links to external Web sites and to your own pages.