Archive for the ‘facebook’ Category

Friday, November 16th, 2018

Feature Update: Sharing to Facebook

Sharing your reviews, book adds, and other LibraryThing activity got an update! To test it out head over to Your Feed and click the “Share this” link next to the action you’d like to share.

Here’s what a posted review looks like today.

The long version

In August, Facebook ended its old publishing actions API, meaning websites (like LibraryThing) that had built out features for sharing directly to Facebook had to rebuild those features from the ground up. Some sites and services, such as Twitter, simply disabled this feature.

Those of you following along on the bug report might remember that we temporarily disabled our share to Facebook feature, too. LibraryThing’s developers (especially Chris C.) spent the last couple months rebuilding our Facebook sharing capability.

How to use it

Sign in to LibraryThing and go to Your Feed by clicking the “Share” link in the upper right corner of any page. Or post or update a book review, and tick the “Facebook” box next to “Share on” before hitting “Save review.”

If you’re not already logged into Facebook, you’ll be prompted to sign in, otherwise, you’ll see your post draft appear right away.

Posting a review links directly to the reviews page, with yours appearing at the top. Sharing a book you’ve added will link to your unique book page.

What’s new?

Review text: previously, we were unable to pull the text of members’ reviews into the body of the post itself. The link showed a snippet of your review (and it still does), but your rating and the full text wouldn’t be visible. We’ve fixed that. You can opt to show that rating and review text (like the screenshot above), or click the ‘x’ while composing your post to show only the link and snippet, like so.

Linked accounts

Linking your LibraryThing and Facebook accounts is no longer required to share things to Facebook. This feature is still useful for finding Facebook friends (see Friend Finder below) who are also on LibraryThing, but it has no effect on whether or what you can share from LibraryThing to Facebook.

You can still link or un-link your accounts here.

Friend Finder

Find out which of your Facebook and/or Twitter friends are on LibraryThing, too! Use the Friend Finder to see your friends on LibraryThing, and send invites to those who aren’t.

What’s next?

We’re still working on improving the cover images that display with sharing book adds.

We also want to hear from you—try it out, and tell us what you think on Talk.

Labels: facebook, features

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Better Facebook sharing

LibraryThing’s Mike Topper has just pushed a big change in how members share their LibraryThing news on Facebook. The change—integrating into Facebook’s Open Graph structure—makes the things you share more visible to your friends and integrates them more cleanly into your Facebook timeline.

If you haven’t already, connect your LibraryThing account to Facebook on the Sites/apps page (and be sure to say “yes” when Facebook asks if you want to grant us permission). Please note: LibraryThing never shares with Facebook without your explicit consent.

There are various places you can share, usually marked with the “share” icon (). Sharing is always available at the top right of the site. We also enable members to share to Twitter.

Here’s what the new sharing action for reviews looks like from within Facebook.

Facebook will also aggregate multiple instances of an action together and display that to your friends.

Adding a book

Adding a book to a collection

Adding a book to your wishlist

Rating a book

We’ll be rolling out more of these types of actions moving forward, so stay tuned.

Come talk about this and Facebook sharing generally on Talk: New Features


Many thanks to the members of the Board for Extreme Thing Advances who helped us out with testing these changes.

Labels: facebook

Monday, May 24th, 2010

LibraryThing Facebook integration, phase 1

LibraryThing/Facebook integration

We’ve just introduced “phase one” of LibraryThing-Facebook integration. It’s been a ridiculously long time coming, but it’s here. The framework for the project is built and one feature has been implemented—review posting.

Posting Reviews. Phase one is posting reviews. Whenever you write or edit a review you can elect to post the review to Facebook, where it appears as on the right. It also links back to the review page on LibraryThing.

On your Edit profile: Sites/apps page you will find a handy checkbox to make the “Share to Facebook” default to “on” (unless you’ve already published the review, in which case you must explicitly make it republish it).

Sharing via Facebook adds the LibraryThing Books app., which is a Facebook app. for LibraryThing. Right now it does nothing except post your reviews as requested.

So, what else should it do? (Everything, okay, but what is most important?) Come talk about it here.

Credits. The programming this time around was done by Mike (LTMike). Members of the Board for Extreme Thing Advances provided valuable help.

Labels: facebook, new features

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

“Also on” and Second Life

We’ve been working on some major improvements to our “also on” feature. In short, “also on” allows you to link your LibraryThing profile to your profile elsewhere, such as Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger, MySpace, LiveJournal, and now Second Life.

If you’ve never seen “also on,” check it out. Go to your profile and click “edit profile.” We’ve got almost 100 sites listed so far. We’re going to be some interesting things with a number of them, but Facebook and Second Life will get most of our attention.

We’ve just added Second Life to “also on.” They don’t have a URL for every member, but we have other plans there!

The Second Life push was inspired by meeting John Lester (SL: Pathfinder Linden) at ALA recently. (Basically, I hailed a guy in a Second Life t-shirt and he turned out to be the operations director of the Boston office of Linden Labs—what luck!) Also, member JPB (SL: Joel CiscoSystems), an amazing Second-Life programmer, has offered to do the “front end” work on Second Life/LibraryThing integration. The “back end” won’t be that hard.

First up will be some sort of program to detect when other LT-ers are near you. When you get near one, LibraryThing and Second Life team up to tell you, and mention a book you share in common.

But that’s just a first step. JPB has head-spinning plans, and we’re happy to help. Come talk about ideas on the Second Life group.

Labels: also on, facebook, second life