Site icon John Battelle's Search Blog

Facebook Now Lets Third Party Apps Link Out…

I missed this, but after some detective work with sources inside Facebook, I’ve confirmed that Facebook now lets third party applications create live links inside Facebook. This has been one of my principal complaints about how Facebook interacts with the “rest of the web” – and now it’s resolved.  

For example, I use the Twitter application on Facebook to update my Facebook status. Everything I tweet ends up as a Facebook status update. There’s certainly no love lost between these two companies, and I’ve pointed out in the past that links in my Tweets are not live in Facebook, so my Facebook friends can’t click on them and see what I’m talking about.

As of sometime a month or so ago, Facebook now makes those links live. As this populates the service, there’s a huge search opportunity (all those links can be crawled, FaceRank can be calculated, etc…)

I think this is huge for the company, and is a major step toward an “off domain” strategy which will let it truly embrace and extend the web. Now, if I could only Tweet from inside Facebook….

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