Facebook had their third f8 conference on April 21st in San Fransisco while being streamed on Facebook. These conferences are like a state of the union, Facebook telling the world what they have been working on, the changes that will be happening to Facebook, and announcing some new features for both users and developers.

Contrary to some posts I have read Facebook is not ending the Facebook Connect. They are changing the brand name and expanding it. They are moving towards using the Graph API which will make it a lot easier for developers to build sites that use the Facebook Platform.

The Open Graph Protocol is a way for users to build their profiles through “LIKES” throughout the net. When a user clicks on a “LIKE” button say on http://www.nhl.com/ice/teams.htm for their favorite hockey team (i.e. the Flyers) on their Facebook page it will let everyone know that they like the Flyers with a link to that site. With 75 site launching this technology the “LIKES” will grow quickly. Here is a link to those site already using Facebook’s new Protocol http://developers.facebook.com/showcase/

Another thing that came out of f8 were new social plug-ins which can be added to any site without much programming knowledge.

So what is Facebook’s master plan with all this information? There are a couple rumors out there that Facebook will start community pages. These pages will be all user generated from different “LIKES” for different genres, for example if you went into the Hockey community you could see what people were saying or sharing about hockey. It would be a neat way to see information from the masses.

If you don’t have the Facebook javascript included into your site you can stilll include Facebook social icons using frames. Here is an example of the code.
<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://blog.netplusmarketing.com& layout=standard&show_faces=true& amp; width=450& amp; action=like& colorscheme=light”<br /> scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:px”></iframe>
Which will show:

If you do have the SDK all the code you would need is
<fb:like href=”http://blog.netplusmarketing.com” layout=”standard” show_faces=”true” width=”450″ action=”like” colorscheme=”light”></fb:like>
As with anything Facebook does, there will a short time of backlash from its users who have to change the way they think a little – and let’s face it people don’t like to think – but in the long run Facebook can revolutionize the web once again.