Google crawls Facebook Comments? Not sure...

On Jan.9 2012, Brendan Irvine-Broque posted an announcement on InsideFacebook saying that Google may have started indexing Facebook comments: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/01/09/how-facebook-comments-impact-google-search-rankings/

Together with Brendan and other subscribers of InsideFacebook, we made a series of experiments to check how it works. As of Jan.17, the results are negative. Nothing from our tests appeared in Google as a result of crawling the comments. The whole discussion, however, has been "leaked" through another website, which grabbed our comments from FB and pasted them as a plain HTML.

Brendan pointed out that:

• InsideFacebook uses an older version of FB plugin
• It may take time to Google to crawl all comments
• There are comments from other sites that have been indexed by Google

So, this is not the end of story. Stay tuned.

Facebook reveal page for Fans / Liked only - very simple!

Here is a very simple Facebook Fan page I just made:

ART by LENA Coupons on Facebook

There are several tutorials available, but many of them show steps for an older version of Facebook *) . Here is what works as of December 2011:

• Facebook allows you to create a page (you can call it a "tab"), and place a link to it at the menu on the left.
• That page is able to show an external content, "embedded" to it via <iframe>
• The "page", in fact is a Facebook Application, with a very little capabilities. To make a simple page, nothing is required but making an application and specifying which external URL it will show. The rest is done externally, on your own webserver.
• Your external URL should be available via https: (SSL). That's a new requirement of Facebook, probably because Facebook itself jumps to https automatically (if Account Settings > Account Security > Secure Browsing (https) is "on"), so all embedded content should be secure, too.
• There is a weird way to link your new application to a page:
  http://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=http://www.facebook.com/.
  The "next" parameter can be different, but for a simple page that you make for yourself, using the above "dialog" URL is enough.
• You should setup your external page style using Facebook CSS, so it will look like a part of Facebook. I think that having the same font family and size is very important for a simple fan page.
• There is a way to get information about your page visitor using Facebook API, but again, for a very simple Like/DoNotLike it is not required. In my version, I do not even validate the request, so hackers are welcome to reveal the coupon code by crafting a Facebook request (takes more time than pressing the [Like] button though :-)

*) Tim Ware's HyperArts Blog has the most up-to-date information

RSS Graffiti tests so far

Here are the results of my first tests:

1. RSS Graffiti does what I expected it to do: my blog posts go automatically to my FaceBook
2. The "Standard" format has many configuration options allowing to make your FB post quite nice
3. The "Status Update" format does not show any link to the actual blog entry (or I did not find how to do it)

The next test I am planning is to post to one of my FB pages instead of my wall.

RSS Graffiti - Test No. 2

My first blog post appeared on Facebook in less than half an hour. However, it did not look nice, because I selected the "compact - status update" format, and (a bug?) there was no link to the full story. Only the blog title.
Let's see how this post will appear. I also added an image to see if it will appear in the FB post.

RSS Graffiti and Facebook

http://www.rssgraffiti.com/

I just discovered this today and am writing this post only to check if it will be posted automatically to my Facebook page.

Log in to Facebook to personalize your experience with this social plugin

I was unable to click on any FaceBook [Like] button until I enabled 3rd party cookies in FireFox.

With 3rd party cookie disabled, a FaceBook login pop-up window appeared each time asking to "Log in to Facebook to personalize your experience with this social plugin". Entering login/password wouldn't help. The pop-up appeared again and again.

(Tested on iframe version of FaceBook plugin, but I think that JavaScript version needs cookie, too...)