Integrating with Facebook

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Facebook in various forums. The company seems to have been painted with a bullseye of contreversy, especially since their annoucements at F8 outlining the future of the business and the Open Graph Protocol. While I don’t want to get involved in the overall debate, which has occupied many industry leaders, I would like to take a look at one tiny aspect of the open graph, the Like Button, and how we’re getting involved at Spoonfed.

It was a pretty easy decision for us to impliment a Facebook Like button on the site; we have hundreds of venue and artist details for London places and performers. However we also list over 30,000 events per month – a lot of things for people to ‘like.’ Events are slightly different to artists or venues and don’t necessarily represent a long term interest of our users (long running club night, exhibitions or comedy shows aside). So when we added the ‘Like’ button, we recognised that we also needed a way for users to share events that they liked and wanted to attend in a temporary manner that reflects the temporary nature of the event.

To do that, we added a one-click ‘add this event to Facebook’ button, in addition to the Like button, which would automatically create an event on Facebook and allow our users to quickly and easily invite their friends. Users can still ‘like’ an event but if they want to have access to the event on Facebook while it’s still upcoming, and not have the event details forever tied to their profile after the event is over, creating a Facebook event through Spoonfed is a great option.

We’re interested to see how our users make use of these two funtions on the site, both of which are developed to help Londoners share their favourite events with their friends. We believe that a ‘like’ model that mimics the temporary nature of events themselves will be a great way to encourage more events, from London and farther afield, to get integreated into the Open Graph.

Take a look at what’s on in London on Spoonfed to start liking events and creating events on Facebook for yourself.