The tech world is still reeling from the impact of Facebook’s radical changes, announced last week a the F8 developer’s conference, and their implications for privacy, the open Web and the future of social networking. However, these newly introduced features, such as the “like” button for websites, social plugins and Facebook’s Open Graph API, have spurred some early-adopting developers to create tools for end users that include everything from bookmarklets to search engines. Over the course of the past week or so, a number of these tools have been covered by leading tech blogs (including us, of course), but we wanted to create a resource that lists all of them in one place.
1. Zesty.ca/Facebook
Zesty.ca/facebook: Want to see what Facebook knows about you? Don’t let its stark interface fool you – this search engine is filled with useful information. To use it, enter in your Facebook user ID or username (if you created one) and you can see what information is currently being shared publicly.
2. ItsTrending
ItsTrending: ItsTrending is a new website that shows what items are being shared the most across all of Facebook. The site breaks down the public shares into categories like videos, news, images, sports, tech, gaming, entertainment and comedy. Even if you don’t use Facebook, the site is great for discovered viral videos and other popular content.
LikeButton.me: Somewhat like ItsTrending, this site also focuses on popular Facebook content. However, instead of focusing on everyone’s shares, it looks at what’s being shared by your Facebook friends. Essentially, it’s a collection of links your friends find interesting. A drop-down box lets you customize the page to show links by category (like sports, tech, video, news, etc.).
WeRSocial is another implementation of this setup, but the categories are on the left instead of in a drop-down box.
4. Open Facebook Search
Open Facebook Search: Even if you’ve never signed up for Facebook and never will, you can still use Open Facebook Search. It’s a search engine of the Facebook timeline and all the public data it contains outside of Facebook. Just type in your query and click “search” to see Facebook conversations, links, photos and videos in real-time.
5. OneRiot
OneRiot: The real-time search engine that previously indexed sites like Twitter, MySpace, Delicious and Digg has now added publicly shared “likes” to its index. The addition of Facebook data provides “search results that reflect the pulse of a much, much wider social Web,” says a company blog post.
The Facebook Like Button bookmarklet (described here) lets you like anything on the Internet – even if there’s no like button available on that page. Using the bookmarklet instead of a page’s own “like” button also protects you from “like fraud” – that is, being tricked to like something else besides the webpage they’re on.
7. Facebook.me
Facebook developers used the Open Graph API to created Facebook.me, a Web service that turns your Facebook content into a blog via a Facebook app. Once you authorize the app to access your posts, comments, photos, videos and other items, it’s published to this external site. You can then customize the page using a built-in theme switcher. (Note: only for those who don’t mind publicizing all their Facebook content!)
Have we forgotten something? Let us know in the comments.
