Facebook Introduces a New Share Dialog

Sharing is an important component of every social service and it's understandably important for Facebook as well. Thanks to its 250 million users, the social network sees over one billion items shared among friends and with the world each week. Still, it could do a lot better, especially considering Twitter's success with a much smaller install base. One way Facebook is encouraging users to share more is through a redesigned Share dialog, as many users believed the old one left much to be desired.

“Facebook Share is one of the most powerful and simple ways for users to share articles, pages, video, or Flash content from your site with their friends on Facebook,” Isaac Salier-Hellendag wrote on Facebook's Developers blog.

“The new dialog includes all of the key features of Facebook Share – users can post a link to their profile or send it in a message to just a few friends, choose an image to include, and add a comment. We expect the new design will increase the amount of content shared as well as the traffic back to your sites.”

The main reasons behind the changes are Facebook's desire to have a consistent look and feel across the various elements on the site but, more importantly, the desire to have people use the feature more. For the users, the redesign is mostly cosmetic and some argue that the functionality is still far behind FriendFeed's, the social feed aggregator that Facebook just acquired for close to $50 million.

The developers can implement the new Share dialog on their sites in two ways. The first one is the straightforward code snippet available at Facebook's Share Partners site. However, there is a second, more customizable method employing the FB.Connect.streamPublish call allowing developers to encourage users to publish stories to their News Feed. While the new dialog may not be on par with FriendFeed's, things are bound to get a lot more interesting as the two companies become more intertwined.