Facebook not so evil

So today I have a new view of Facebook. They’re not evil but they’re like a growing teenager, big, clumsy and not aware of their own strength. In a dramatic reversal, Facebook did a complete about face on their odious Terms of Service agreement. The new Terms of Service created a huge negative backlash on the Internet when it stated that Facebook owned anything you publicly posted on your Facebook account forever. Facebook reverted back to their original ToS a couple of days ago.

With my updated view of Facebook, I have enabled Facebook integration into Netharuka. I know many of you who read this site are also bloggers in your own right. If you haven’t heard, Facebook now offers a widget (grab it here) that enables users to logon and comment on your site using their Facebook credentials. What’s more, comments can also be simultaneously posted on their Facebook account.  Plugins are available for a number of different web and blogging platforms, but I’ll be discussing how I got it installed on Wordpress below.

An example of a Facebook enabled comment box. Mine of course looks different.

It took a little doing this morning, but I finally got it running. The widget got a fatal exception error when I first tried to install it using Wordpress’ plugin/browser installer function. Checking on the support forum on Wordpress, the error is apparently linked to the fact that I’m running PHP 4. Funny, last I checked I was running PHP 5, the version which the plugin requires. Anyhow, I simply just tried to install it again and the plugin installed without a hitch the second time. Next, the application prompted me to get two long ID codes from Facebook. You need to grab your public API key and your secret (I realize that I probably didn’t need to smudge out the public API key).

Grab the two codes, API Key and Secret, generated for you by Facebook

Finally, you copy this snippet of PHP code into your Wordpress blog. I believe that other blog platforms will require something similar. This snippet allows for the Facebook button to show up.

<?php do_action('fbc_display_login_button') ?>

You can see the Facebook button on the bottom of every single post page where you’ll see the Facebook button along with the standard way of logging onto the site.  The button is supposed to show up regardless of whether or not you’re logged into Wordpress, but if I’m logged in, I don’t see the Facebook logon prompt. I don’t know whether that’s a bug or whether I didn’t follow the instructions just right…something to look into later. ^^

Anyways, I think the functionality is interesting, and hope that it will make logging onto this site and commenting a lot less painless. I may even do away with the CAPTCHA eventually. Still, for a relatively new site, I get an insane amount of spam.

What’s definite is that many large social network sites have realized that interconnectivity is the new black, and that the work done by Google and Twitter among others hasn’t gone unnoticed. I don’t think its a stretch to see that you’ll see essentially a single logon via federation in the future, where logging onto one service will enable full or at least limited functionality with many others.

Credit goes to Ars Technica for the heads up.

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