Tonight Facebook has announced that the launch of their “first social widget” for Facebook Connect. It’s a comment box which enables blogs, photo galleries, or other sites, to add comments to their site quickly. This is surprisingly the first public widget we’ve seen Facebook release. Contrast that with Google Friend Connect which immediately launched a community widget for user’s sidebars.

This comment widget theoretically competes with numerous blog widgets that are already out there. Unlike traditional Facebook comments, this widget enables developers to customize the background color, text color, and other attributes via CSS. Developers can theoretically integrate this service directly into their own system by using the comments.get API call.

Those that choose to enable the comments widget also have access privacy settings for each widget on an individual or global basis. The company has also stated that this is “just one of many social widgets” that will integrate with Connect. Does that mean we should expect the company to release more widgets in the coming weeks and months?

Not necessarily as they were referring to existing widget services but I would bet that we’ll see more regardless of what third-parties (or as Facebook calls “fourth parties”) have to offer. If you want more details, go check out Facebook’s post from tonight about the new service.

Update
One huge feature of this widget is that comments posted on your profile in reference to a given comment thread will also show up on your site. This is a huge advantage, mimicking much of the functionality provided by a couple FriendFeed and Twitter plugins that are scattered around the web. On this site in particular, I’ll receive comments here as well as comments on my profile. It would be great if that information was made accessible on my site.

There are some inherent privacy issues with this feature though. I’ll be exploring that in another post but this is definitely a much welcomed feature.

the social discovery tool for sharing your favorite media items, has just added a couple of new features that make its user experience a little better. For starters, LivingSocial has added TV to its growing categories for media sharing and recommendations, broadening your options further than just books (which LivingSocial started out with), dining, movies, music, beer and more. Yes, LivingSocial had a beer category before it had a TV category, but it may have been worth the wait.





The use of a Hulu application allows you to view television episodes within a tiny pop-up, meaning you don’t have to navigate away from LivingSocial in order to see a particular episode. This may be highly encouraging for some users, as it allows them to watch an episode and offer their ratings and reviews immediately instead of LivingSocial having to rely on users that have already seen a particular show in order to offer their ratings and reviews.


This feature really opens up the immediacy of on-demand media in relation to social recommendations, so hopefully this will relate to beneficial contributions for LivingSocial’s database in regards to further spreading ratings, reviews and recommendations around the web and across mobile devices, LivingSocial already has a number of Facebook, Bebo and hi5 applications, as well as an iPhone application. But the other new feature LivingSocial is announcing today is the inclusion of Facebook Connect which makes it significantly easier to login and share information to your Facebook friends. For personal reasons I prefer simply using Facebook Connect, as the LivingSocial applications are all separate based on the category. But from a practical standpoint, LivingSocial is likely hopeful about the new Facebook Connect integration as it allows easier social content flow between the two sites.

This was a major concern for LivingSocial after Facebook made changes to user profile formats resulting in a “placement predicament” for applications such as their own. In all, the recently funded LivingSocial is making some good feature updates that are clearly taking the user experience into consideration while also appearing to be good business moves for development and growth purposes, as LivingSocial is all about sharing, organizing and recommending media in a very social sense.