A First Look at Facebook Fan Box

I had five separate people email me this week about the launch of Facebook Fan Box, which is a widget that allows you to integrate your Facebook fan page into your website. The Fan Box shows the avatars of a select number of your fans as well as a news feed of your most recent page updates. Given the buzz about the tool, I spent some time playing with it. Below is the widget for the fan page of our blog, The Bivings Report.

Here are some quick thoughts on it:

• This is a great move for Facebook and a great way for marketers to promote their Facebook pages. I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the usefulness of Facebook Pages. On the projects I’ve worked on, I haven’t seen a lot of traffic driven by Facebook Pages and the level of engagement from fans has been pretty low. However, with this and the redesign of Pages a few months ago, Facebook has shown a real commitment to making Pages useful for marketers. They are clearly moving in the right direction, so I will be jumping on the bandwagon early.
• The launch of this widget is a big blow for similar tools like MyBlogLog and the Google followers widget. Why would I use tools like those that have never really gained traction when I can instead integrate with Facebook?
• This is another sign of Facebook opening up its site in reaction to Twitter. Tools like this and Facebook Connect show that Facebook is moving beyond the walled garden approach that dominated its early strategy.
• The tool is extremely easy to use, but I hope Facebook provides more ways for users to customize the widget. The widget must be a minimum of 200 pixels wide, and while you can customize parts of it you can’t really mess with the colors or design much. So if the widget doesn’t work with your site design, you are out of luck. I expect that to change with time.