New Facebook Pages and Other Product Updates

Facebook held today a press conference webcast to discuss the new Facebook Pages. Mark Zuckerberg along with Director of Product, Chris Cox, and Product Manager, Peter Deng participated in the 2 hours webcast. One of the main features they revealed, among other product updates, were the new Page's format. Read the complete coverage here.

Do you think this new Pages will replace traditional Landing Pages?

Virgin Goes Facebook Connect

Virgin announces its new Virgin.com website. It includes many social features that allow their audience to interact with the content published in various sections. Since Virgin is encouraging its users to interact, they revealed that they are working with Facebook Connect application for their planes. “What if you could send a drink from the Virgin website to your friend on the plane using Facebook Connect?” hinted Virgin’s Alex Hunter today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. Hunter is the Head of Online Marketing for the Virgin Group.

In theory, you will be able to do things such as:

- People could find their friends on Virgin flights and send them virtual gifts in real time
- Travelers could find their friends on the same flight and try to get seats next to them when checking in
- Virgin could provide a myriad of deeper travel application experiences for its customers

This Facebook Connect implementation will be the beginning of new social experiences when flying.

Do you think other airline companies are going to take advantage from this type of applications?

Facebook Connect vs Google Friend Connect

On Thursday night, Facebook announced the launch of their first social widget for Facebook Connect. It is a comment box that lets publishers enable comments from Facebook users on their site, and in turn, have those Facebook users publish the comments back to their Facebook profiles and share them with their friends.



And there is no secret that Google has its own service, Google Friend Connect, which is also open to everyone. But which one is better and easier to use? Lets take at look at both services and review some of their features.

The Key Difference

As we know, both services let you create applications on your website to allow users to interact with the site and their friends by logging with their respective profile accounts. The main difference here, is that Facebook is a social network, while Google Friend Connect is open to any service or site that uses OpenID for identification. For example, with Google Friend Connect you can log in with your Gmail access, meaning that you don’t have to be part of a social network at all in order to use it. On the other hand, Facebook Connect is useless for anyone who is not a user in Facebook.

It’s All About the Marketing

Facebook is a 120 millions members social network. And there are millions of services out there looking to establish engagement with this audience. Therefore, a comments tool can help them do the job.

Easy to Use

Both services require a snippet of code in your site. As far as I know, anyone can add Google Friend Connect to their site, however, adding Facebook Connect apps take a bit more of an effort. It seems like FB’s processes are more oriented to developers, rather than casual users. This could be a big turn off for people with no technical knowledge.

Have you try one of these two services? Is there anything you would like to share to this post? I will like to hear your point of view.