Is Facebook moving away from a mainly private social network? Until now, there wasn’t an easy way to embed Facebook status updates, posts, or your favorite photo/video of the moment into other news websites or blogs. Well, today that all changed. Facebook wants to branch out into more “live” web events – think Twitter-esque. Only a handful of websites (Bleacher Report, CNN, Huffington Post, Mashable, and PEOPLE) are currently participating, but it’s expected to spread quickly.
As soon as availability is expanded, the drop-down dialog box that lives at the upper right of your Facebook posts will include a click option to “Embed Post”. This will open a new window that includes the HTML code to copy/paste to embed your post in its original form to a news or blog site, much like the code used to embed a YouTube video.
Embedding will only work on posts that are open to the public or posted by someone that allows non-friend followers. Liking and sharing posts would be available without ever loading Facebook, though they would update back to Facebook. To participate, the website must install a Facebook plug-in to enable embedding Facebook posts.
Facebook already added hashtags; now the potential for other sites to show and update Facebook posts in their original form blurs the line even further between Facebook and Twitter. You have to wonder how popular this will be considering most posts on Facebook are not set to Public.
