Make your facebook and wordpress interchangeable, new facebook wp plugin

[Slowdive]

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook/

Its a bit of a dog to get running, its a little fiddly like all things facebook and never does precisely what you want. However the end result is pretty cool, letting people comment exactly as they would when using facebook, being able to control what is auto published to a page.
It still needs a lot more usability and hopefully that will come but for those who want to really integrate with FB its a winner, I am going to give it a try and see how it performs for one of my blogs.

[Kay]

Thanks for the heads up. I'm considering giving it a go too. However, I'm a complete newbie with FB - I guess it's time I learned. Really, though, it doesn't interest me. What do people do on FB anyway? They seem to fall into two main categories as far as I've seen.

1. The type who has trouble running a simple blog so they have a FaceBook account instead. Most of my friends who are computer-clueless have FB pages. Hmm.

2. The type who uses FB in the same way as they use Twitter to promote their businesses. They relentlessly blat their promotional message AT you. That's why I never use Twitter any more. (Dave sometimes tweets for me.)

Anyway, I am most of the way to launching a brand new blog (coming soon!), so I've set up a FB account to match the domain name. I want to see if FB really is as good as some people seem to suggest for building a following and driving traffic to a website or blog. I'll maybe follow in your footsteps on this one to see how FB helps my new blog.

With the recent change of ownership, perhaps FB will completely change personality. For me it's just yet another place to waste time.

[Slowdive]

Facebook converts well for two particular categories in my experience. Service centred businesses where I can use facebook to answer questions, offer advice and create a sense of trust which often becomes a sale when people are ready to invest in a service. The other is sales but particularly hobby or collectable items. I used to make 80% of my living with collectable minerals and still make a little in that market, its imperative in that market to be a "friend" people are buying something out of love and they want to be able to share that experience.

The plugin itself has some awesome features and serious limitations, it is actually a facebook app, so I need to find some hours to find out how much I can customize it. What I am loving is that people can just comment with their FB account and as such add to my blog and more importantly value to my pages. The fact I can select where updates are sent as well is great.
Its around four days old so I think the community will mod it and eventually I think its going to become an awesome tool to a website in the right niche.

[Chabrenas]

@slowdive have you already checked out or used Simple Facebook Connect? Limited function, but I may give it a go to break myself in to the concept slowly.

[Slowdive]

You could actually try a few I have not tried that one but Disqus is still very good. My largest complaint about the FB app is that its fiddly and you need to setup a facebook app to get it to really work as you would like. I am also encountering bugs, so where as its a great toy and I am loving it on my little tech blog. I could not recommend adoption into a money site yet, in case it messes up or loses one contacts by not performing. I think what will be more noteable about this than the actual plugin is that it opened the gates to seamless integration. Expect to see a few new plugins pop up in the next month, doing the same thing but with better accessibility. When some one gets it right its going to be an exciting tool