Facebook has announced the launch of the Send Dialog, building off the momentum of the Send Button, which has been added to over 100,000 sites in the first 30 days of its launch, according to the company.
“It resembles the Feed Dialog, but gives people the ability to share a link as a private Facebook message, email or Group post,” says Ravi Grover on the Facebook Developer blog. “The Send Dialog is better than the Send button for deep integrations because it enables developers to build sending messages into the core flow of their website or app.”
“The new dialog was designed for activities that a user may want to only share with specific people, which makes it particularly useful for ecommerce, travel, and event websites,” Grover adds.
It even lets you pre-populate a user in the “to” field, which is interesting.
“Facebook Messages are intended for high quality conversations between friends, not impersonal, unwanted messages,” he explains. “Apps on Facebook should use Requests to let people communicate in-game status, invite friends to use an app, or send messages to multiple people. The Send Dialog is appropriate when a person might otherwise send a personal email.”
As with the Send button, the Send Dialog should be able to help drive targeted traffic to websites, since people are sharing content with very specific friends or groups.
The Send Dialog can be seen in action at Airbnb, Gogobot, Keepsy, Jetsetter, SniqueAway, and Viagogo. You can get the code for it here. It doesn’t require any special user permissions.
The feature is not currently supported on mobile devices.