Integrating Facebook Connect in your job site is not rocket science
Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 1:08pm Monday 12 April 2010
Just over 12 months ago I wrote a blog post titled Integrating Facebook Connect with your Job Board on the pros of doing this. Since then, I have only seen a handful of job sites with Facebook Connect integration. Why? apparently it's too hard to do.
One of the most useful and powerful features of Facebook Connect is the ability to access a user's profile information as soon as they connect with your site. This can enable you to provide a much richer and personalised experience for the user without forcing them through multiple set-up screens.
Facebook claims that 
- 97% of users have full name
- 85% of users have uploaded a picture
- 8% of users have specified education history
Once a user connects to your site or application, you are able to access and use information that the user has shared on their profile to provide a richer experience. In addition, you can access information about the user's friends and others on behalf of the user of your app - basically any information that is available to that user on Facebook can be used through the lens of your site or application.
You should use this information to immediately create a personalised and social experience. For example:
- Localise jobs to the users geography.
- Feature content shared or created by the users friends
- Identify other users in the same geography or industry and feature content or trends of those users.
- Create tailored or different experiences based profile dat
- Suggest a users friends to invite to your product and service based on the friends interests
- Feature key information from a user’s stream that is related to your website or application
Integrating Facebook Connect is not rocket science. Yes, you need to understand programming to do so, but there is a wizard to help you through the process. Take this example I created last night - a total of 20 mins work and I am already half way there!
Once a user has authenticated with your application or website, you can use any of the Facebook APIs listed below to access data about the user that they have made available to applications. In addition, to provide a more social experience, you may access data for a user’s friends to bring those friends into the experience.
You may also request permission from the user to access information from the user’s stream to view information shared by the user’s friends.
When accessing and using the user's data, it's important to keep a few things in mind
- Users have provided this data to Facebook in order to share it with their friends.
- Users have discrete control over who can see this data via privacy settings - and your site needs to honor those completely.
- Users may choose to make some of this data public, which you can then use to display publicly as well (often the case for name, picture)
- Users can change this data at any time and often do. Most frequently changed fields are status or user posts to stream, profile picture, interests, friends, and privacy settings. Because of this, you should make sure you always have up-to-date information and may not only cache the data in your system for more than 24 hours
- Contact information (email address, phone number) are not directly available via the APIs. However, they do provide other APIs and permissions for you to contact users by email or SMS, or for users to contact their friends via the Stream, requests, notifications, and more.