Getting on Facebook
On Tuesday, we jumped on a bandwagon and launched the Common Kitchen application on the Facebook Platform. Right now, it’s a pretty simple little thing: if you add the application to your profile, every time you review something on Common Kitchen, an item will appear in your Mini Feed saying so. If your friends have the application installed as well, they’ll see that story in their News Feed.
There are two pieces to this. Here, I’ll just explain the outline of what the application does and where we’re going with it. Later, I’ll address the question, why?
If you’re not already using Facebook, you’re not missing anything about Common Kitchen. We’re never going to provide functions on Facebook that aren’t present on the site itself. This application provides a way for people using Facebook to keep tabs on what their friends are doing on Common Kitchen; you can also do that by going to your profile page and clicking the “RSS” icon next to the “Activity in my network” headline.
To use the Facebook application, you need to be signed in on both Facebook and Common Kitchen, so if you’ve added the application you may find that every now and then Common Kitchen asks you to log in to Facebook. Then, when you post a review–of a new restaurant, a cookbook, a recipe you just tried–your friends on Facebook can see that in your feed. (If you want to avoid this for one review, you’ll see that there’s a checkbox with your review; un-check it, and we won’t tell Facebook about the review.) Second thoughts? Facebook provides a little “X” next to the news item so you can delete it from your feed.
Facebook also limits how many items from us will appear in your feeds; the limits are per-user over varying chunks of time, and there’s also a “fudge factor” they build in which essentially means we have little control over whether your review will be noted on Facebook at all. Most of the time it will.
So far, this doesn’t amount to a whole lot, but we’re still exploring the platform and figuring out where Common Kitchen and Facebook can overlap. We’d love to hear your ideas; we’re already looking at notifying you about which of your Common Kitchen friends are also on Facebook, and making it easy for you to add them there (if you haven’t already,) and vice versa. We’ll make it possible for you to share your favorite restaurants, cookbooks, and recipes in your profile. Any new functions will be added to the same Common Kitchen application, so if you add it now, you’ll see our upgrades as they happen.
If you have any good ideas about how to improve our application, or what other features we should add, feel free to get in touch! And if you’re wondering, yes, you can find Noah, Parker and Audrey on Facebook…
One Response to “Getting on Facebook”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[...] I laid out the basics of our little starter Facebook application. What I didn’t do was explain why, given all the [...]