According to a find by Tom Waddington, Facebook is testing a “Want” button. The plugin would apparently work in the same way as the “like” button on sites.

Here’s an example of the Facebook Want button. Currently, publishing want actions is disabled, though the button does render.

Although the functionality for a “want” button plugin exists, Inside Facebook points out that there’s no trace of any sort of “Want” plugin on Facebook’s master list of social plugins

On sites, it appears that the "Want" button would look a lot like the "like" button. It even says the same thing next to it ("be the first of your friends to ____ this").

Sites that implement a hypothetical "want" button would see Facebook users share their desire for a product or service in a whole new way. How many times have you seen one of your friends "like" something, but also add some sort of text like "WANT!" to the post? "Want" implies desire, and desire for a product is contagious.

And a "Want " button could also serve a purpose as a data mine. The "like" button sure has. Can you say targeted ads - really targeted to what people truly want?

Waddington actually has the “Want” button up and running on his site, but clicking on it currently displays an error.

Facebook announced today that they are making a Facebook for WordPress plugin publicly available. So why is it being announced by Facebook and not WordPress? Facebook engineers created the plugin to bring the Facebook experience to WordPress. In an awesome move, the plugin also works with the mobile version of WordPress.

The Facebook for WordPress plugin is really similar to what you would find on an app that utilizes Open Graph. Like Open Graph, the plugin allows you to cross-post content between WordPress and your Facebook Timeline including any other Facebook pages that you may own. You can also enter specific names for pages or friends before publishing on WordPress and it will deliver your post to the appropriate profiles.

Facebook also released a number of widgets on WordPress including Activity Feed, Recommendations, Customizable Like, Subscribe and Send buttons, and Comments Box. All of these aim to make your WordPress site more social and visible to those who also use Facebook. An example would be using the Activity Feed plugin which shows people what their friends are liking and sharing on the site.

While the new Facebook for WordPress plugin is definitely available and usable by the general blog owning populace, the true potential of this plugin can be seen for businesses. It’s mentioned that WordPress powers 16.6 percent of the Web and that’s not just personal blogs. Pretty much every blog styled Web site out there uses WordPress and this plugin should help them reach a larger audience.

It’s pretty easy to install the Facebook for WordPress plugin, but here’s a handy tutorial if you’re new to this. If you already know how to install plugins, you can download it right now and get to sharing your WordPress content with the world, or the world as defined by your Facebook page.

Not only was the outage a problem for Facebook and its users, but apparently it also hurt some major e-commerce sites that sat “spinning” while waiting for resources from Facebook to load. It appears that sites that were affected were ones that connect to Facebook’s open graph, display the “like” or “share” button, etc. According to web monitoring company Catchpoint, sites with Facebook plugins experienced “massive performance and usability issues” during the outage.

Some of the sites affected belonged to retailers like JCPenney, Urban Outfitter, L.L. Bean, Teleflora, and 1-800-Flowers.

From Catchpoint:

The issue affected mostly web sites that have placed the Facebook code inline in their page. From an end-user perspective the “spinning hourglass” never stopped while loading the web page because the browser waited and waited and waited for resources to www.facebook.com to complete which they never did. Worst case scenario users might have seen pages hanging or functionality of the page was impaired.

By contrast, sites that loaded content before making third-party requests didn’t show any problems on the user end.

Here’s a graph that they provide showing how one of the aforementioned retailers was affected:

For webmasters, this kind of thing is a reminder that outages of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google can affect their sites in a pretty serious way. Of course, Catchpoint makes a point to say that it’s more of a “wake up call” for site owners to be prepared and build their sites in a way that expects this sort of thing.

As far as the outage goes, many speculated that Anonymous may have been behind the attack. They responded via Twitter with an emphatic no:

[h/t Business Insider]

The office hours last week were hosted by Jennifer Murphy, a developer programs engineer for Google. She gives a short demo of the new jQuery plugin that is making the rounds around the Google+ development scene. The source code is available for you to try out now, but I suggest you check out Murphy’s live coding tour of the software first.

After showing off jQuery, Murphy answers user questions for the rest of the office hours. One thing that should make a certain developer pretty happy is that you can sign up for a Google+ Platform Preview account. This allows you to see and mess around with pre-release versions of Google+. It’s especially useful for developers who make a Google+ application and don’t want to see it break when new major changes hit the Google+ platform.

Murphy also addresses some other concerns regarding Google+ APIs and updates to potential problems regarding a conflict between Google Analytics social actions and the +1 button count. It was also announced that moderation tools are not coming to Hangouts yet, but Google is listening to all the feedback regarding this.

The final announcement sees a change to the Google+ Platform Office Hours schedule. It used to be that the Google+ team would do one every week. They are cutting back soon to a twice a month schedule so they can focus on higher quality content in the hangouts.

Check out the entire video to learn more about Google+. Become informed and use it to make your Google+ app even better.

WebProNews and the iEntry Network have launched a new WordPress plugin utilizing this tool. With WordPress being the most popular blogging platform, and Facebook being the most popular social network, we think a lot of people will be interested. 

"Registration is an integral part of any web presence," says Mike Marr, who developed the plugin. "It puts a name to our virtual guests – an otherwise very difficult task." 

"Facebook’s Registration Tool gives developers a familiar face from which users are encouraged to register, all the while streamlining the process for the vast number of existing Facebook users," he adds. "It makes sense that you would want this tool as a part of any website, including those powered by WordPress. Thus, we simply put the pieces of the puzzle together, and want to share with the community what we’ve come up with."

As Facebook’s Paul Tarjan explained when the company launched its tool, it can minimize the friction associated with signing up for a new account. That means a possible increase in conversions.  

Install the plugin from your WordPress back-end, or download it from WordPress here. To activate it, use the "plugins" menu option in your admin control panel. You’ll see a "Facebook Registration" options page under settings. Just enter your Facebook App ID and App Secret here. 

 The WordPress plugin requires WordPress version 3.0 or higher. Of course we would love feedback on the plugin, so if you have any comments or questions, or have issues with it, email developer Mike Marr at marr@beyondwp.com.

More info about the plugin can be found at BeyondWP.com.

Apparently the Facebook Connect WordPress plugin has now leaked. Though still in beta mode, it would allow Facebook members to connect with one another via comments on WordPress blogs. This is not unlike what Movable Type has done.

"The difference with the Facebook WordPress plugin is that the WordPress plugin is an internal Facebook project," writes Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook – the Unofficial Facebook Blog. "This also means that Facebook wants to be able to own the comments on your site. Anytime you enable users to login via Facebook, you won’t have access to their email address, unlike Disqus and native WordPress comments. That would probably be my greatest complaint."

Facebook did contact O’Neill and said that it was not an official Facebook project, so I guess it is still up in the air when it comes to that. With the Movable Type version, Facebook users who visit Movable Type sites can sign in to their Facebook accounts without creating a new one. Profile pictures and names can be displayed, and friends updated when you "participate on the web."

I’m assuming that the WordPress version will serve basically the same purposes. There’s no word on when it will be released to the public. Facebook made O’Neill remove it, and probably have had others do the same.

1) Advanced Editor

The WYSIWYG editor evolves and now includes eleven new ‘advanced’ functions. Just hit the little colored squares icon on the right of the main toolbar and you’ll get the additional buttons.

Included are:
Format dropdown for header tags.
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as plain text.
Paste from Word. Fixing my previous complaint.
Clear Formatting.
Clean Up Code. OMG I think I’m in love.
Special characters.
Undo and Redo.

2) Tagging
Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer needed now that WordPress will do tagging. Actually, Ultimate Tag Warrior had many more features so I guess it can’t be ruled out all together. But the new tagging functionality is nice. I can see people getting confused with tags and categories now as they are very similar.

A nice touch is the ability for Wordpess’ tagging system to import tags from other plugins. The WordPress team was really thinking on this one.

3) Auto Updates
If a plugin is hosted on WordPress.org, or if it ties into the new API, it’ll now check for updates automatically and notify you on the plugins page. No more wondering which plugins are out of date. WordPress as a whole should do the same thing.

4) Canonical URLs
This is a fancy way of saying they fixed a lot of possible URL issues. From www vs non-www URLs to automatically setting up redirects for when a user changes a post slug.

It even says that WordPress will now redirect URLs that get cut off in emails to the correct post. This means that if someone types in most of your URL, but is missing part of it, WordPress will find the best match and display that. It’s very user friendly but not necessarily search friendly as it can cause duplicate content issues.

Example:

Original: http://www.site.com/blog/this-is-my-post/

Cutoff URL: http://www.site.com/blog/this-is-m

Now the cutoff URL will show the same content without redirecting to the correct URL. I’m sure someone will fix this pretty soon.

There are other new features in WordPress 2.3 too, just not as noticeable to the user. Th is a great update to already amazing software package. Just be sure that your plugins are all 2.3 compatible before upgrading to ensure you have the best experience possible.

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New version 2.3 offers a wide range of enhancements and new features, including:

• Tagging
• Automatic notification of updated plugins
• Automatic notification when new WP versions are released
• Much better management of posts and draft posts
• Improvements to the built-in text editor
• Automatic site addressing (if your address has ‘www’ in it or not, WP will let people find your site)
• A number of technical changes such as additional SQL database tables, multiple category widgets, better support for languages other than  English and full support for Atom 1.0

See the full list here.

The new feature that most people will probably be the most interested in is tagging. Simply put, tagging  lets you add free-form labels to your posts so you can classify your content more flexibly than only by using more rigid categories.

Dougal Campbell has a good explanation of the differences between categories and tags. Also see Lorelle Van Fossen’s explanation.

I plan to upgrade to 2.3, first on my sandbox before here on the main blog. One reason for doing it this way is to be sure that all my plugins will work with the new version.

If you’re thinking about upgrading, be sure to review the upgrade guidelines from WordPress first. Then follow the upgrade instructions to the letter.

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"There are 93.8 million blogs worldwide," says SEO-PR president and co-founder Greg Jarboe. "Getting excited about getting a blog is like getting excited when the phone book arrives."

"Yeah, but, it’s your name in print," says Navin Johnson.

That’s not a reason to not have one though. A blog is still an effective way to get noticed and to gain an audience. "Things will starting happening to you now," reminds Navin.

But only if you do it right. "If you don’t have a blog, go ahead and start one," says Jarboe, "but the whole industry has moved on. It’s now about performance; it’s now about results."

Okay, so how do you get those results? Well, there’s probably not a finite set of things, but there are some good suggestions. Jarboe suggests staying away from turf already claimed. "Look for emerging terms. Find terms that are upcoming or growing in importancethat don’t have five years of entrenched bloggers competing for them."

But if you have to enter ground already well-traveled, it’s a good idea to get in good with those that know the road. Join their conversations, get their attention, earn a link.

Jarboe joins Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, LLC in providing some expert advice on optimizing a blog, and we’ve organized that advice into a neat top ten list. (The plugins recommended are all for WordPress.)

10 Ways To Optimize Your Blog

1.    Tag clouds and tag pages; check out Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for creating these. Spencer says he doubled traffic to one his blogs by adding it.

2.    Add a "Related Posts" feature. Spencer recommends the Contextual Related Posts plugin for WordPress.

3.    Top Ten posts feature to display most popular posts

4.    Add "next" and "previous" post buttons

5.    Build inbound links

6.    Title tags – use SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress to assign unique title tags to individual posts.

7.    Claim your blog at Technorati and use Technorati tags

8.    Use "sticky" posts that always appear at the top of the page as a way to add a keywords-rich introduction to category pages. Adhesive plugin works for this.

9.    Use the Buzzlogic tool to find out which bloggers are most influential in conversations – refer to them and try to get them to link to you.

10.    Get into other bloggers’ blog rolls (trackbacks and comments won’t help in link gain.

Bonus: Rick Klau, who works in strategic partner development for Google, also has some solid advice for optimizing RSS feeds via Feedburner and even Facebook. He also reiterates the importance of providing full text feeds rather than partial feeds. Check out 10 Tips For Optimizing RSS.

• Greet visitors from search engines with a list of relevant posts.
• Enable visitors to subscribe to comments.
• Display your most popular posts.
• Easily interlink series of posts.

ProBlogger led me to the post, and there are even more useful plugins mentioned in the ProBlogger comments, including ones that enable you to:

• Greet returning visitors/commenters.
• Send a thank you e-mail to commenters.
• Remove nofollow selectively or completely from commenters (as Andy Beard mentioned in our comments).
• Add the magic sentence Nate Whitehill mentioned (from our first post on blog stickiness).

Why am I so obsessed with blog stickiness? Because for many bloggers, that’s one of our only goals–a low bounce rate. Also, other important blogging goals can be related to this, such as subscriptions and possibly affiliate or direct sales.

How have you improved your stickiness?

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