This post actually is a comment I left for this blog post, but decided I would also post it here.  The author’s post discusses contrasting opinions on using several separate social media websites vs. using Facebook for everything.  My comment is below:

Great post!  In a way, I would strongly agree with you.  In a way, I desire more integration.  Ironically, I actually found/read your post through Facebook Notes because you tagged Richard.

I, too, am an avid user of the “best” social networks (Flickr for photos, del.icio.us for bookmarks, YouTube for videos, LinkedIn for professional networking, etc).

Here’s what I like about what Facebook is doing: making these services available and known for “the masses”.  Blogging/Notes, Photo Sharing, and now Shares.  For people who wouldn’t normally use any of these features at the above named other websites, this is great.

Automatically recognizing blogs listed as “websites” and integrating/importing blog posts as Notes is genius.

In my opinion, this is the kind of the thing that Facebook really needs to do.  Here is another example:

What if Facebook extended this type of functionality to watch your del.icio.us (and other popular/competing sites) bookmarks and automatically import them into “My Shares”?
[Aside: you may not want to pollute everyones News Feed each time someone bookmarks something, but perhaps a message like: “Phil Freo has Shared _7 items_ today.” with a link to those items would be good.]

The magic for Facebook can then happen when a lot of del.icio.us users have all their bookmarks as Shares.  “Normal users” (the kind that don’t use del.icio.us) can then benefit from everyone else using it by being able to search/find the best websites about anything.    By keeping the current Shares model, I would never think to search Facebook Shares for a good website (or search my own bookmarks) – but this would cause me and a lot of other people to rely on Facebook for even more, which is exactly what they should want.

So, what else can Facebook do to both integrate *and* allow non-techies to benefit from?  Here’s three to get you started.

1. Automatically watch/import/tag my del.icio.us (and competing) bookmarks as Shares.
2. Automatically watch/import my blog’s comments in imported Notes
3. Automatically watch/import/tag my Flickr photos where possible into My Photos.

[Aside: yes, there are issues with each of these, but I’m more than confident they can be worked out.]

For the average user, there is just a massive amount of very valuable content on Facebook.  For the power user, they now have all of their own content on Facebook.  Everyone would then be happier – especially Facebook.

After spending time today with frustrating IE6 CSS issues with borders on ul and li tags, I finished my CSS navigation tabs. The CSS is based on the XHTML produced by the WordPress K2 theme, but can be easily matched for any site.

Here is the CSS:

ul.menu {
margin: 9px 9px 0 9px;
padding: 5px 0px 6px 10px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #afafaf;
}

ul.menu li {
margin: 0px;
list-style: none;
display: inline;
}

ul.menu li a {
margin: 0;
padding: 5px 12px 6px 12px;
border: 1px solid #afafaf;
background: #DDE;
font: normal 12pt Georgia, 'Times New Roman';
color: black;
text-decoration: none;
}

ul.menu li a:hover {
background: #333;
color: #eee;
text-decoration: none;
}

ul.menu li.current_page_item a,
ul.menu li.current_page_item a:hover {
border-top: 1px solid #afafaf;
border-bottom: 1px solid white;
background: white;
color: #333;
text-decoration: none;
}

BrowserCam is an extremely useful (and quick) tool to easily see a screenshot of your websites in over 30 different OS/browser/version combinations. It’s incredibly handy instead of guessing whether it work in other browsers, or trying to install multiple versions of each browser. It’s free for 1 day for every email address you have…

On an unrelated note, 10 Minute Mail, 2 Prong, and Mailinator allow you to have an instant free temporary email address for those sites that require you confirm an email address but you know you don’t need your real address. Leave your browser window open until you get that “confirmation” email and then forget about it.

PS - If anyone has any advice as to how to easily paste CSS or other code and have WordPress preserve it’s formatting (line breaks and spaces), let me know.