Today (actually, it was yesterday but it feels like today) we announced a cool new integration with Facebook  that delvers additional value for our customers.

The integration is delivered via the Awareness Facebook Application Framework.  That allows us to create white-labeled Facebook applications for our customers that let the users of their Web 2.0 communities interact with their communities from right inside Facebook.  This is cool for a few reasons:

1. It extends the reach of a community directly into Facebook.  Everyone wants their community to have the broadest participation possible, and one of the important ways to do that is to allow the community members to interact with the community in the way they prefer.  Typically, that's been giving them options like voting, rating, commenting, blogs, wikis, disucssions, etc.  Now they have another option:  they can participate in their communities from inside Facebook.  We can build for them a Facebook application that will have their name and brand identity, and once a user installs it they wil be able to see and participate with their community from inside Facebook. Pretty cool.


2. It lets them leverage the viral aspects of Facebook.  We all know that when a user installs a Facebook app their friends are notified via their news feed.  Facebook users can also explicity send notices to their friends to encourage them to install an app.  This also works for the custom Facebook app that we create for companies.   So it provides a another way for the company to spread the word -- virally -- about their community.

The first customer to implement this is one of the New York Times regional newspapers -- the Port Charlotte Voice.   You can see and install their Facebook app here, and you can see their main community here.

You can read more details of about the Awareness Facebook Application Framework here.  To our knowledge this is the first enterprise social media service that integrates with Facebook.  The analysts that I've discussed this with can't identify any others.

Do you have any thoughts on this?  Please comment on them here.

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