Posted 10/26/09 at 08:29:05 PM by Jason Barry

Facebook has taken a pot shot at Digg’s URL popularity service. The social networking giant has upgraded its Share button to display sharing statistics.

The Share button has been around for quite some time and was one of the first Facebook Connect features. It has had overwhelming success in turning Facebook into one of the best to share popular internet content—effectively making services like Digg obsolete.

Facebook also opened all of the analytics associated with the sharing habits of its Facebook users. Inevitably, this will change the way advertisers and media publishers tailor their content to fit the interests of their respective demographics. “We hope you’ll create tools to help analyze and understand how users interact with your content on Facebook,” said Mark Kinsey on the Facebook developer blog about the new analytics.

This is yet one more step Facebook as taken to continue its headstrong effort on becoming the all-in-one solution to the internet. Do you use Facebook Share? Do you (or did you) use Digg?

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Posted 12/05/08 at 02:05:19 PM by Andy Salisbury

This past Thursday both Facebook and Google announced their own separate “Connect” features, designed to extend social networking capabilities further across the Internet. The connect programs, named Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect respectively allow users of the two sites to port content they have entered (such as photos, contacts, notes, comments and status updates) to other partner pages.

Google’s service is already available to any site publisher that chooses to implement it. The features become available with a simple copy and paste of some code, so advanced coding knowledge isn’t required. Once it’s been added to a site, users can log into the service using their Google, Yahoo, AOL or OpenID accounts.

Facebook is looking to their users for help in convincing web sites that their service is worthwhile. “Obviously our launch partners don't cover all the websites you use on a daily basis, so if you want to see this list grow, get in touch with your favorite websites, developers, and services, and tell them you want to connect. With your help, we can all share more information across the web,” wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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