Facebook has become a dimension of social media that enables companies as well as individuals to display their information and communicate with their friends and customers.

There are many ways to integrate Facebook to a website by the use of the “like” button or displaying a wall and also creating a page or an application.

To create an application if you are familiar with creating a page is pretty simple, all you need to do is to create a developer account, create an application and customize the profile of the application. The application will be viewable in a url similar to the following “app.facebook.com/your app name/” and required to have at least one developer account, but many can be added.

There are 2 ways of creating an application and Facebook provides a nice interface to help you choose the type of application you would like. You can either select a frame application, which is the default, or an FBML application. If you plan on keeping it simple, I would suggest using a frame. This gives you the freedom of creating any type of app without the need of Facebook integration. If you plan on integrating Facebook to the application, you will probably require the use of FBML. For both of these set-ups you will need to have a server that will host your application files.

The advantage of having a Facebook application instead of a page is that you can have a lot more content and pages within that content; you can consider it a mini site within facebook. This can help you obtain information from clients by having a contact form and also creating a nicer means to communicate the different products or promotions your company has.

Have you ever wondered if there is a system you can use to connect all of the social networks you use? Look no further, Meebo is a free service that allows users to gather all their friends in one single buddy list.

Meebo offers real time interactions with different IM platforms which facilitate talking and sharing information easily. Platforms that are supported by Meebo include AIM, Yahoo!, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, Facebook IM and many others.

Meebo offers these services through a variety of tools such as a Meebo bar, Meebo notifier, Meebo me, Meebo rooms, Meebo mobile and even as an extension for Firefox. These services can be very useful for a marketing strategy since it provides an organized and compact approach for interacting with clients using social media. Meebo provides multiple services that can be useful to maintain a close and real time contact with clients and with company employees as well.

The Meebo Bar allows the option of sharing and chatting on a blog or site, the Meebo notifier on the other hand provides a connection without the use of a browser and displays messages on your computer. This can be very useful in a working environment. The Meebo me, allows you to add a chat to your blog or site, which enables you to chat with visitors/clients and keep track of them as well. The Meebo rooms allow you to chat and share media on chat rooms or a site. The Firefox extension provides the same service as an add-on to Firefox, where you can see your buddy list and be able to chat and drag and drop links to the conversations. Another service offered is Meebo mobile, which is an app for mobile devices including the iPhone, Android phones and Windows based mobile phones. This application provides the buddy list, and Chat service.

The use of this type of application can help SEO by providing real time updates to users’ accounts such as Twitter recently added to Meebo and Facebook, enabling the search results provided by Google to include the latest information posted. This being through a computer or through a mobile phone, which allows you to post any information to your social media accounts wherever you are, that is if using a 3G network.

Have you ever bought an item and made a tweet about it or placed it under your Facebook status? If you have and you like sharing your current shopping trends, there is a social media site available which provides that opportunity for you.

Blippy allows visitors to view its users current shopping expenses, encouraging visitors to buy something that a user from Blippy has bought. In a way this site is advertising the companies and products where users have recently bought their items. This site can also help study the shopping trends of people and help companies in many ways by providing information regarding the purchases made at their store and other stores.  Even though this site has only started providing this service since December, its goal is to continue to expand by creating a mobile version in the future, as well as creating an API to allow its data to be shown in other applications.

Blippy also brings a very interesting topic to mind, and that is how much personal information people are willing to share on the Internet. This can be in some cases a reason for people to stay away from the site since it contains sensitive information, but it also provides them the ability to view other user’s trends/expenses.

It would be very interesting to see this site considered in the future on Google product search results, as it provides current information regarding shopping trends, similarly to how Google results are being affected by Twitter and Facebook.

Reference:
http://blippy.com/terms

Are you interested in starting your own blog?
If you are, there are a couple of things that you will need to consider.
Do you want to set up your blog as a user host platform or on a developer hosted platform? A lot of people tend to choose developer hosted platforms, since all they require is a set up of an account and no installation is required from the part of the user. If you decide to go for a user host platform, you will need to install your blog, which in many cases gives you freedom to change the blog’s style more easily and faster. Another important factor that user host platform blogging software provides is the implementation of SEO in the template of the site; usually developer host sites have a restriction when it comes to making the site template.

A question that might help you decide which blog platform to choose is: do you currently host a site? If you do, you can place blogging software in your current hosting server, meaning you will use a user host platform. This will allow you to keep all of your web content in the same location, which allows the indexing of your site and blog to be to the same domain and not two separate domains, allowing a better SEO implementation toward your main site.
If you decide to place your blog in the same hosting server, you should do a little research if you don’t already know about the type of server that you are using. Is it a Windows server or Linux? If it’s a Windows server you can use Engine.net, DotNetNuke or Subtext if using .Net. If you currently use PHP on the server you have a lot more options to choose from. If you are using a Linux based server, you need to check what has been installed on your server. Do you have PHP, Ruby on Rails, Java, or other languages or platforms installed in the hosting server? After having that information you can begin looking for the right blogging software for your blog.
If you do not currently host a site, you might decide to use a developer hosted platform, such as Blogger, wordpress (developer hosted version), or typepad. If you would like to use a user hosted platform, a lot of blog sites offer different hosting services. 

Another question that you need to have in mind is: Are you going to add widgets to your blog? If you are, you will need to conduct research on what kind of widgets you would like to add. Depending on the blogging software that you choose, the widgets will either be free or you will need to pay a fee for them. In the case of free open source software blogs, the widgets are usually free and there are more available. It is a good idea to keep in mind that there are widgets available for SEO implementation and these widgets should be a priority when creating a blog.

After gathering all the information needed and doing research on the widgets you would like, you can make the decision of which blogging software or sites is best for setting up your blog and customize it.