Facebook launched the Live Stream Box today, which is a feature that lets website owners and developers enable Facebook users to connect, share, and post updates in real-time as they witness events online. Think CNN’s Facebook integration from the Presidential Inauguration.
“The first self-service Facebook Connect widget, the Comments Box, was released earlier this year, and is now used by hundreds of blogs, news, reviews and photo sites,” a Facebook representative tells Murdok. “They benefit from one click commenting and the ability to offer users a way to share their comments on the site and back on Facebook as a Feed story — both on that user’s Wall and in the user’s friends’ streams. Where the Live Stream Box is great for real-time events and live streaming, the Comments Box is for asynchronous commenting over time that can be archived and searched as a log for activity around a specific piece of content.”
The Live Stream Box is intended for use with events like:
– concerts
– speeches
– sporting events
– webcasts
– TV Shows
– presentations
– webinars
The box can also be used with multi-player games, or anything else that has a bunch of people visiting your site at the same time. Facebook says the box is “built for scale,” and can handle millions of viewers updating in real time.
For those interested in putting the Live Stream Box on their Facebook Page, a post at Facebook’s Developer Blog highlights an offering from Ustream, which recently featured a series of Jonas Brothers webcasts.
To use the Live Stream Box on your site, users just log-in via Facebook Connect and share their updates, which appear in the box as well as on their profiles and in their friends’ streams.
One part that webmasters and marketers will particularly like is the fact that updates will automatically include links back to the box on your site. This creates an opportunity to bring more people to your site.
