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4 Viral Social Software Tips From Enterprise 2.0: Page 2 of 2

10 Cool Social Media Monitoring Tools
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He also gave a nod to the Mozilla Foundation's BrowserID, which provides a browser-based means for users to identify themselves to multiple websites.

3. Set Defaults With Care

Facebook has recently exemplified the trend toward sharing by default, with applications that share your news reading or music listening habits automatically, without you having to click a "share" button.

Making things automatic can be a convenience, but the "opt in" versus "opt out" decision on activating such features is a tricky one, LeBlanc said. Anyone who has been overwhelmed by updates from a friend who has fallen in love with FarmVille should understand the downside.

"All of you have seen annoying application traffic," even in a system where the user proactively pushes out updates, LeBlanc said. "Just imagine if user didn't grant approval for that every time. If you take that aspect of control away from the user, you can get really bad gray areas. If the users feel like it's out of their control, they won't tend to use it, because they won't know how it will react."

4. Use Open Technologies

As a developer, LeBlanc understands the urge to build everything yourself, believing you can do a better job. "But then timelines are cut, budgets are cut, and feature creep comes in until we wind up with a perversion" of what we intended to create, he said.

Take advantage of the work others have done, and you have a much better chance of success. One of the best open standards social software designers can take advantage of is the Open Graph Protocol. For years, Web architects have extolled the vision of a semantic Web in which content would be encoded with meaning, rather than just formatting. Metadata standards have been proposed, defined, and put into use--only to drift toward irrelevance because they are used by so few sites. Then along came Facebook with the Open Graph Protocol and "brought the semantic Web back to life," LeBlanc said.

Facebook uses the Open Graph Protocol, together with other elements of its platform, to allow other websites to embed elements such as the "Like" button, which integrate with facebook.com. When the user clicks the button, Facebook reads the metadata in the associated Web page to classify that content and assign a headline, summary, and image to the blurb that appears in the user's activity stream.

The Open Graph Protocol is closely associated with Facebook, "but it's a complete open standard, so why would we not leverage off all the hard work Facebook has done for us," LeBlanc said. OGP is a simple tag language you can use to pack a ton of contextual information into your website, "and the best thing about an open standard is it can be extended if you need something else," LeBlanc said.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard