Part of the series on NewsCloud's Philosophy of Online Community Building and Social Media.
The NewsCloud Open Source platform allows news and community organizations to run either a Facebook Application or a Facebook Connect Website. In fact, it can run both simultaneously for you.
What do each of these concepts mean and what are the pros and cons of each kind of site? This is a common question from our partners and it's often difficult for our contacts to explain these concepts internally within their organizations.
What is a Facebook Application?
You can run the NewsCloud community platform within the Facebook website. This allows people to click on links from a Facebook page or a friend's wall without leaving Facebook.
If you are promoting your application from a Facebook page or from a Facebook advertisement, it's great to link people to your application without making them leave Facebook.
Pros:
- Readers don't have to leave Facebook to use your application
- You can still track statistics for page views with your existing Google Analytics or Omniture account
- You can still integrate your own advertising rotation system inside the canvas area of your application (everything to the left of the Facebook ad rail on the right.
Cons:
- Facebook's canvas area is narrow, so your community application is more visually compressed
- Facebook's application URL is complicated and hard to spread by word of mouth e.g. http://apps.facebook.com/yourboston
- Facebook's application pages load more slowly than our Facebook Connect application because there is a lot more Facebook-specific material being loaded (navigation, advertising, etc.)
- Facebook's advertising will appear on the right side of every page. Facebook is making money from your application's usage.
- As of October 1, 2011, Facebook requires SSL certificates be purchased and used for managing canvas application sessions. This requires additional expense and administrative burdens.
What is a Facebook Connect Website?
You can run the NewsCloud community platform as a standalone website which uses Facebook Connect to authenticate (register and sign in) members. You can also use elements of the NewsCloud website as an extension to your existing website, linking to specific interactive features (blogging, predictions, classifieds) as you need them.
Pros:
- You can use your own domain name e.g. http://theneedle.us or http://carolynhax.washpost.com which makes it easier for readers to share your community site
- The website version of our platform loads faster and provides more visual space for the layout because it's not restricted to the Facebook frame
- You don't have to place Facebook advertising on your community site
- You can still track statistics for page views with your existing Google Analytics or Omniture account
- You can still integrate your own advertising rotation system inside the canvas area of your application (everything to the left of the Facebook ad rail on the right.
Cons:
- When promoting your community site within Facebook, links will make readers leave Facebook to see your site.
Do we need to choose between one or the other?
Thanks to the model view controller architecture of Ruby on Rails used by the NewsCloud platform, we are able to run both a Facebook Application and a Facebook Connect Website for you simultaneously without additional management burden. So, essentially, you do not have to choose - you can run both. See Carolyn Hax on Facebook and on the Web.
For sites that run both, we suggest they use links to their Facebook application when promoting from within Facebook (pages or ads) and use links to their Facebook Connect Website when linking from their existing website, newsletters or other marketing materials.
Which is best?
In general, we recommend that organizations promote their Facebook Connect Website because they are faster, have simpler web address URLs to share, offer more visual layout space and don't give advertising space away to Facebook.
Why do we require Facebook for people to use our community application?
In the future, we expect to allow for user's of our Website model to log in with other accounts via Twitter Connect, Open ID and user name / password models. The issue is that Facebook does a great job of authenticating users as real people with names and faces. This leads to more civil communities, the kind our partners want to encourage. Facebook authenticated communities have less spam and less abuse than open websites.
Our work has been generously funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is freely available for open source download. You can read Facebook's own platform documentation here.
If you have more questions, please visit http://support.newscloud.com
Read the previous post: Hosting the Open Source NewsCloud Platform.
