Social Network Integration
Wikipedia defines social networking service as “…an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activitiesâ€. Some popular social networking service sites are facebook and twitter. The world has gone social. The primary evidence is when you log in to your facebook account and see how many of your friends are online. More and more people are getting online every day and make it as part of their daily life.  They engage with each other, playing games, sharing activities, interests, and/or passions with their network of friends. They discover meaningful contents for them and join conversations. The activity and authenticity of the social network is made up of real people – and these people could be your customers. That is one reason why it is beneficial for businesses to integrate social networks, such as facebook and twitter, to their websites. Once a user like, recommend or tweet your website, it will be shared to their network of friends and this personal recommendation is a powerful kind of endorsement. Your website will have more opportunity to be visited that offers your products and/or services to be known to customers. Ever wonder how many people can find your facebook page or tweets? According to Wikipedia, facebook now has over 600 million active users all over the world while twitter has 200 million (as of January 2011). It’s now time for your business to join these social networking sites to keep in touch of your customers and get the edge by integrating it to your website. There are many ways of integrating these social networking sites to your website or web applications. Social networking sites provide Widgets, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and SDKs (Software Development Kits) or devkits which Software Developers can use to create custom applications or integration supported by their platform. For example, Facebook has the “Graph API†that enables us to read and write data to Facebook. We can now retrieve data like photos, events, likes, update statuses and other data objects. They also provide SDKs for certain programming languages like Facebook PHP SDK that provide Facebook Platform support for PHP-based web applications. Other Facebook SDK include Android SDK, .NET SDK, etc. Article and Presentation by John Michael Dalisay, Junior Software Developer for EACOMM Corporation. Social Network Integration
Facebook Likes/Shares Checker for a Webpage
Facebook integration is by now ‘a must’ for websites. By providing tools to share or like your site to Facebook, it gives your site a lot more opportunity to get read and seen by the 500 million ++ users of Facebook. Facebook has developed several simple to use API’s for this which can be found here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web. Statistics can be monitored in http://www.facebook.com/insights, however the data presented is far from complete. For example, something as simple as monitoring how many people has “shared” or “liked” your website is not easily determined. Fortunately there’s a handy link for checking the number of Facebook “likes” or “shares” of a given Web Page URL also provided by Facebook but not as known: http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://www.eacomm.com The above query will return an XML document in the following format: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <links_getStats_response xmlns=”http://api.facebook.com/1.0/” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:schemaLocation=”http://api.facebook.com/1.0/ http://api.facebook.com/1.0/facebook.xsd” list=”true”> <link_stat> <url>http://www.eacomm.com</url> <share_count>3</share_count> <like_count>3</like_count> <comment_count>13</comment_count> <total_count>19</total_count> <click_count>0</click_count> <normalized_url>http://www.eacomm.com/</normalized_url> </link_stat> </links_getStats_response> This can then be parsed by a simple application to store the statistics in a database. For example in PHP you can use the simlexml_load_file to parse this. Below is a very simple code (admittedly not very elegant, but it works) to do this: $url = “http://www.eacomm.com”; $xml = simplexml_load_file(“http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=$url”); $child=$xml->children(); $child2=$child->children(); $shares=$child2->share_count; $likes=$child2->like_count; $comments=$child2->comment_count; $total=$child2->total_count; $clicks=$child2->click_count; You can now store the shares, likes, etc. in a database and monitor for yourself how your website is performing in Facebook. Below is a form to check if your site has been ‘shared’ in Facebook: http://www.eacomm.com/fblikecheck.php Facebook Likes/Shares Checker: Enter the Web Page you want to check: