Paradox Designs

Facebook is great. It lets you share things with your friends, and does a good job by doing so. One problem is that many people have fairly boring profile pages. Usually they have one or 2 annoying apps, and nothing that is actually useful. There is a way you can integrate the various services you have an account on into your facebook, to make your page truly say who you are.

Apps

The best, and easiest approach to integrating various sites together is through facebook’s app platform. If the service has been around for a while, you can probably find an app with its name or something close to its name. For example, to add your reciently played music from your computer can be done easily. First, get a last.fm account, if you dont already have one. When you have a last.fm account set up, add the What im listening to app[1. This application hasn't seen an update in a while. It is the best app there is for synching your profile and last.fm, but leaves a lot to be desired. For example, you cannot add it to your Wall page on the new layout]. Enter your name and password, and then configure it. Presto, now your friends can see your music tastes.

This can be done with a number of services. You just have to find them on your own.

Newsfeed

Another way to integrate services is by using the Facebook newsfeed features. These were released earlier this year, with little fanfare. They allow you to add a number of services, or an RSS feed, to be posted directly to your newsfeed. As of this writing, they support Flickr, Digg, Picasa, del.icio.us, Yelp, Google Reader, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Last.fm, Pandora, hulu, and RSS[2. A number of people have asked me if RSS is the way i syndicate my blog to Facebook. It is not, i use an application for that purpose. There is a plugin here, and the application at facebook. The plugin pushes updates to facebook, so facebook doesn't eat my bandwidth.] .

To add these to your newsfeed, visit your profile, then click the Settings link (the one with the gear next to it. This will pull up a settings menu with options to add the various items[3. You will only see a few at first. Click more and they all show up]. Click one, and it presents you with some self explanatory options.

These can be filtered, so if your friends decide they dont want to see so many, they can block them.

All in all, by making facebook aware of your services, you expand your profile so much, and you have to do very little work. I encourage it for anyone who wishes to truly keep your online identity as realistic as possible.