Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Instant Personalization

You should be aware of one more element of social plugins. Some of this probably fits well in some of the Graph API chapters of this book, but because it's so similar from site to site, I include it here. I'm referring to the product that Facebook provides called Instant Personalization.

Instant Personalization is a feature that Facebook provides only to selected partners, but it enables those partners to instantly be able to personalize the experience of any visitor to their Web sites without that user ever having to physically log in to Facebook. As long as that user is logged in to Facebook elsewhere, he or she should instantly see what his or her friends like on the site and what those friends are participating in.

One example of this is RottenTomatoes.com. (See Figure 6-14.) When you visit RottenTomatoes.com, you are instantly greeted with a list of movies that your friends on Facebook like, your friend activity, and even movies that RottenTomatoes recommends to you based on your Facebook friends' activity.

Instant Personalization sites all must have an opt-out message prominently displayed on the site, and users can also turn it off in their Facebook privacy settings. However, if you have some money and a great idea, you can quite possibly convince Facebook to include you in its list of select partners for this program.

To sign up for Instant Personalization, you need to get an account rep. This usually means that you will need to spend a lot of money ...