In the process of rolling out Facebook marketing campaigns for clients that involve some combination of Facebook Applications, pages and groups, we often get asked what that the difference is between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups, and more importantly, which is better.

To the untrained eye they are pretty similar, but in reality, for marketing purposes – Facebook Pages are significantly superior to Facebook Groups. In general they have all the features of a group plus (the very important) ability to add applications and do perform more extensive customization on the page. Here is a quick comparison of the two:

• Applications: Pages allow you to add many of the thousands of applications available on Facebook. This allows you to add apps like RSS feeds and other dynamic content as well as to customize your Facebook page.
• User Interaction: Applications (including IFRAMES) support increased user interaction on Facebook Pages. Groups do not support applications and only sponsored Groups (for companies committed to spending at least $50K in advertising for a minimum of 3 months) can add IFRAMEs.
• Promotion: The ability to promote your page or group is key to any marketing campaign. Pages provide more flexible ways to recruit fans/users including placing Social Ads that point to your page as well as the ability to send email updates to fans.
• Invitations: Both pages and groups have equal support for inviting other users to become fans of a page or join a group. Groups may actually have a slight edge in the category but not a significant one.
• Metrics: Pages provides comprehensive and valuable “insight” on user activity on a page. This functionality is sadly missing from groups.
• Associations: You’ll notice that groups (optionally) have a list of related groups. Unfortunately there is no way to control which groups appear on that list, making it rather useless. With a page you can add a list of links (to groups or other resources) that you want to promote or associate with your page.
• Access: Probably one of the most important differences. Anyone (aka the public) can access a Facebook Page. Groups, however, require users to register and sign up for Facebook.
• Administrators: Groups reveal information about who the group’s creators and administrators are, page keep this information private.

Quite often we get the request: “I want a widget”. Although most people making that request have an good idea of what platform they want their widget deployed on, some don’t. Here is a quick look at some of the common widget platforms options available, their pros and cons, and other important considerations:

• Flash-based Web Widgets: This remains the most common platform for widget development. Widgets built in Flash are generally designed to be embedded on social networks, blogs and other web pages (by simply cutting and pasting a snippet of HTML code). They can be distributed directly or using a Widget marketplace or distribution platform. About 80% of the actual widgets we build fall into this category.
  

• Other Web-based Widgets: There are a number of other web-based start pages, portals and communities that prospective clients are sometimes interested in developing widgets for. These include services like iGoogle, Windows Live.com, Pageflakes and Netvibes. Widgets built for specific web-based services are generally are generally not portable across services. We usually build widgets in a way that increases the likelihood reuse (since most services support some flavor of Javascript), additionally some services, like Netvibes, have “wrappers” that allow them to be used in other start-pages.
  
  See more comprehensive lists…

• Desktop Widgets: Desktop widget platforms include Yahoo! Widgets, MacOS X Widgets, Microsoft Vista Gadgets and Google Desktop Gadgets. Widgets built for these platforms are designed to run on a user’s desktop. As a result, they are generally are not spread virally or via “drive-by” marketing. Prospective clients evaluating or considering desktop widget platforms are usually driven by specific customer requests or applications. Most widgets built for a desktop platform require that the user first install a widget engine (Windows Vista and MacOS are exceptions), a process that can be time consuming and can pose a barrier to adoption.
  
  See more comprehensive lists…

• Facebook Application: Although a a widget can be embedded in a Facebook (FB) application, a FB app is “technically” not a widget – its a lot more. When building “widgets” for the FB platform, most people are talking about developing a Flash-based widget and then build a FB application to “contain” it (the are some limitations). The alternative is to ditch the widget idea and simply build a full featured FB app that takes full advantage of the platform.

  

• Other Social Media Applications: This involves building applications or “porting” existing Flash-based widgets to platforms like OpenSocial (for MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and others) and Ning. Unless you have a compelling reason for doing this, you are probably better off with one of the other options.
  
  See more comprehensive lists…

So What Widget Do I Need?
Hopefully you have already answered that question. The platform (or platforms) you select to develop and deploy your widget(s) on depends on the following:

• who your target customer is (consumer, customer, enterprise, prospects, i.e.)

• the purpose of the widget (marketing or utility)

• what your marketing or customer acquisition goals are (related to purpose)

• how you envision the widget being used and distributed (is it viral?, i.e.)

Clients interested in solving marketing, awareness and branding problems are usually interested in Web-based widgets (or social media applications) that are often seen, easily spread and hopefully come with a compelling reason for folks “driving-by” to spread them.

Clients interested in using widgets to deliver utility or functionality or extend an existing application, are probably most interested in Desktop widgets.

Clients that want marketing exposure on numerous widget marketplaces (WidgetBox, Netvibes, Yahoo! Widgets, i.e.) are probably going to want to build smaller (feature poor) widgets on a technology (Flash, i.e.) that works on multiple platforms.

Clients targeting “paying” or enterprise customers are probably looking at specific desktop widget platforms.

More Widget Platform Information
I hope this answers some of the questions people about widget platforms. I have also created a section (wiki.metablocks.com/widget-platforms) on the Metablocks Wiki dedicated to tracking relevant widget development platforms, feel free to check it out.

Tags: facebook, opensocial, ning, widgets, flash, google, netvibes

We do widget, and as anyone who creates or user widgets knows Adobe Flash-based widget have dominated the social networking and media landscape for many years. With the advent (and growing popularity) of the Facebook Platform, many thought that Flash-based widget would quickly and easily make their way, unfettered, unto Facebook pages, but this has not been the case!

Flash does work on Facebook, but with some limitations. For companies and developers looking to port their Flash-ware to Facebook, here are some important considerations to be aware of:

• Facebook does not support Flash to Javascript communication
• Interaction between Javascript or FBSJ and Flash is prohibited. You’ll have to use flashvars to pass information into your Flash component.
• Facebook does not support Flash links/navigation
• In more technical terms, navigateToUrl and getURL by default do not work in Facebook (See work around)
• You have to embed your Flash in an IFRAME in order to enable navigation to work.
• Facebook and Flash have a problem sharing the same session
• In less technical terms, writing Facebook/Flash applications that recognize a user’s unique activity require some hard work (and experience).
• Flash cannot automatically begin playing on a user’s Facebook profile page
• Flash components cannot automatically begin playing on profile pages, so the fb:swf tag displays a developer-specified place-holder image until the user interacts with the object.

We recently ported a Flash-based game to Facebook and were faced with some of the challenges of the Facebook platform imposes on Flash apps, mainly the limitations Flash applications have when communicating with their “container” (the Facebook canvas page).

When building and integrated a Flash app with its container, many situations come up that require you to pass information into the Flash application (via Javascript or Flashvars) and get information out of the Flash application (via Javascript or a redirected URL and a query string). Anyone who has build a more complex Flash application knows what I am talking about! Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t support the type of communication.

Since Facebook doesn’t support external communication via Javascript or FBJS, and since Facebook doesn’t support navigation by the Flash application (via navigateToUrl or getURL), it becomes difficult to convert more complex Flash/Flex applications and widgets into Facebook application.

Since we do a lot of Flash to Facebook porting work for clients, we have to develop workarounds to many of the problems that plague Flash apps on Facebook. Here is one such solution:

Enabling Flash to Facebook Book to Flash Communication:

1. Put your Flash application in an IFRAME within your Facebook Canvas Page
   You can pass information to your Flash application (located in the IFRAME) by passing a query string (<IFRAME src=”flash.php?value=x”…>). The PHP page in which your Flash application sits, picks up query string (“value=x”) and passes the parameters as a Flashvars to the Flash application (<EMBED src=”..” flashvars=”value=x” …>).
2. Your Flash application communicates back to your Facebook Application using getURL(”..”,”_top”,”GET”)
   Since your Flash application is in an IFRAME, navigateToUrl or getURL will work! The trick is to make sure you get using GET and setting the target to “_top”, the URL should be a URL to a Facebook Canvas Page (http://app.facebook.com/myapp, i.e.). This way your Flash application can pass information via a query string to your Facebook Canvas Page.
3. Your Flash Canvas Page picks up the information from the query string
   Voila you are done! You passed information into your Flash application (such a a username, i.e.), and you got information back from your Flash application (use as the high score, or test results, i.e.)! Complete 360!

If you having problems porting your Flash apps and widgets to Facebook, let us know! At Metablocks, we love solving hard problems, especially Facebook related ones!

Tags: facebook, flash

MySpace is finally ready to launch its OpenSocial-based development platform. According to Mashable, developers can now submit applications for review and the first set of approved applications will be available to users on March 13! In January, I talked about MySpace and OpenSocial in one of my previous post Facebook Platform vs. OpenSocial. Although it was announced last November, Google’s OpenSocial partners are only starting to launch their platform initiatives with 3 large sites (MySpace, Google’s Orkut and Hi5) launching over the next month! MySpace’s Jim Benedetto did a great job at the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference outlining MySpace’s upcoming platform’s strategy.

When Facebook launched its f8 application platform it experienced a 37% increase in growth and the number of available application quickly grew to over 10,000 by the end of year. It is going to be interesting to watch MySpace’s OpenSocial platform roll out as far as the number of applications being developed and if they do indeed bring users back to the site.

In May 2007, at the Facebook F8 event, Facebook launched its application platform and announced a slew of third party developers. Since then Facebook has the Web’s “App De Jour”. By courting developers, rather than fretting over third party widgets (like MySpace), the flood of new Facebook applications has accelerated the social network’s already runaway growth, contributing to 37% of Facebook’s growth since the platform was opened in May.

The success of Facebook has promoted a growing number of application, service and content providers to include Facebook apps as part of their marketing and product mix. In fact, Facebook application design and development has become the most requested service here at Metablocks. We have found, however, that even more important then building Facebook apps is understanding how to strategically design and deploy social media applications (including widgets) to achieve a client’s business goals. Social media applications do not exist in a vacuum, and can have one or more of the following objectives:

• To promote a service by serving a “viral marketing” function and getting the word out or creating brand awareness
• To extend a service’s feature set or functionality by enabling its use within social networks
• To add to or extend the collaborative or community aspect of a service by leveraging the relationships users have on social networks
• To provide application functionality or utility that currently doesn’t exist on a social network or is significantly better than what currently exists

I also like the way Leveraging Ideas categories Facebook apps into their 3 categories:

• Facebook apps that exposes a company’s content to an audience
• Facebook apps designed to gain as many users as quickly as possible
• Facebook apps that create something that provides users with true value

Regardless of how you wish to categorize social media applications, content and service providers need to understand that social media development strategy is just as important as social media application development. Even before Metablocks got into the business of developing Facebook and other social media applications, many of our widget development projects included a social media strategy component to help clients understand how widgets, gadgets, blogs, wikis, and social networks worked together as part of a comprehensive social media strategy. I always continue to stress to clients that they need a viable social media strategy and not just a Facebook app or widget!