Facebook Announces More ‘Ways to Share and Engage’

Facebook made a plethora of announcements at F8 on Tuesday. Some were bigger than others. Some of the smaller ones were packaged together as “new ways to share and engage”. These include q...
Facebook Announces More ‘Ways to Share and Engage’
Written by Chris Crum
  • Facebook made a plethora of announcements at F8 on Tuesday. Some were bigger than others. Some of the smaller ones were packaged together as “new ways to share and engage”. These include quote sharing, hashtag sharing, an optimized mobile web share dialog, the save button, better embedded content, and the Sharing for Devices API.

    Quote Sharing lets you build a way for people to share specific quotes from an article, book, etc. or let people highlight and share any text they wish. It’s supported in the share dialog on iOS, Android, and mobile/desktop web. There’s a plugin for it here.

    Hashtag sharing lets you include a suggested and removable hashtag in the composer when people share from an app.

    Facebook’s Ming Li describes the optimized mobile web share dialog: “Before, when people clicked a Facebook Share button on a mobile website, the browser opened a new tab. Now, you have the option to open the share dialog in an iframe letting people share seamlessly without leaving the content. This only takes one additional line of code with our JS SDK, or a simple configuration change if you’re using the Share button.”

    The Save Button is a button you can place on your site or app that lets people save articles, products, videos, etc. to their Saved section on Facebook. Previously, the save feature only let users save Facebook content.

    Li says of embedded content, “Based on feedback from publishers, we revamped embedded posts with cleaner and more design options, so you can choose the type and size best for your site. For embedded live videos, people will now know that the video is live and see how many people are viewing it. We also launched embedded comments which gives you the ability to embed public comments from Facebook on your site. We’re excited that embeds now download 60% fewer bytes and initial rendering is twice as fast.”

    The new API lets people share content from devices (including IoT devices) to Facebook using a new Graph API.

    Facebook also updated its Comments plugin with improved moderation tools to better combat spam.

    More on all of this and more here.

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