If you’re not using Google Voice yet, I recommend looking into it. It can be seamlessly integrated with any Android phone, and while much more difficult, can be useful on an iPhone too. Having an iPhone 4 myself, I use Google Voice for 95% of my calls and texts. However, this post is about the improvements that I would love for Google to make, which I think would dramatically improve the user experience. I wrote this before I began working in product management, so please do not judge my Product ability by this post.

1. The option for conversation view all the way back in time with a given person. Currently, I can only see brief conversations with each person. The iPhone enables me to see our back and forth communication on one page all the way back, hundreds of texts into the past, a very cool feature.

2. Sync with profile photos from Facebook and accept high res profile photos for my contacts. I call and text people with the same name as my Facebook friends because they’re the same people. Sync their emails from Gmail, phone numbers from GV, and pictures from Facebook. Also the pictures GV stores are tiny and don’t use the iPhone’s caller photo quality potential.

3. Improve “Find duplicates.” I have “Marcus” and “Marcus #” both containing the same 2 phone numbers. I have no idea why it’s not finding this duplicate. I know I have others like this but I don’t know how many.

4. Who are these people in my “Most Contacted” list? Haha I haven’t contacted some of these people in over 2 years, yet some of the people I text every day don’t appear here.

5. Improve contact search. When I type “8620″ it’s not finding Marcus with phone number “5554298620″. Of course this number is an example but you get the idea. When I type 8620 into “Send a text message” box it does find him, so this must be an easy fix.

6. Marcus uses Google Voice and I have his GV number saved with his contact info. He has a picture assigned to his Google account but when I click on his contact info link it shows no picture. Pull his picture, link to his blog, twitter handle, and any other info he publishes there from his Google account.

7. Put my outgoing text at the top of the inbox when I send it like my iPhone does.

8. Let me record outgoing phone calls. You can require both parties on the line to press a key on the phone to confirm intentions.

9. Let me create a Call ID so when I call a land line paying for the service it’ll show my name. Businesses would obviously pay for that feature.

10. Incoming Call ID. When someone calls me from a business (or anyone with Call ID set up on that line), Google should know who it is and show its Call ID in my inbox, along with links to its website, Yelp page & Google local business listing.

11. Enable MMS. When I send a picture from my iPhone through Google voice it never reaches its recipient.

12. For a fee, let businesses record all incoming calls. Before connecting the caller with the GV user, announce, “All calls to this phone number are recorded, to proceed, press one or say yes.”

13. Give me the option to connect via VoIP when connected to WiFi.

14. Let me use “in-network” minutes when calling another AT&T mobile subscriber.

15. Let me accept faxes to my GV number.

16. Enable a bunch of features CallFire has. Charge extra for them if necessary.

17. Bug test the GV iPhone app. It erases draft messages when I toggle between sand by and on, and has many other major bugs.

My primary complaint with all dating sites is that they make profile thumbnails too small on the Search & Match pages. This is in the sites’ best interest because it encourages users to click through to view more profiles. This gives users the sense of more activity when they look at their Visitors page, it creates more advertisement impressions, and it increases the likelihood of users messaging each other. But it’s not in the users’ best interest to click around aimlessly.

Fortunately I’ve discovered some sweet scripts from the source of my killer Facebook hacks that help correct this problem in big ways.

First you’ll need to install Greasemonkey if you use Firefox or Greasemetal if you use Chrome. If you’re using another browser I highly recommend you switch (FF ftw imo btw lol omg). Next you just install the following scripts and refresh the dating site to activate them. I’m not going to mention scripts that remove ads from specific sites because I use Adblock Plus for that.

We’ll start with my favorite dating site, OkCupid. OKC Big Pictures allows you to view the full sized original photo uploaded by a user, without the OkCupid watermark. Once installed, go to the photos tab of any user (except yourself) and click on a photo that looks like it might have a large original version. There appears to be a maximum resolution of 1500 x 1500, which is 4.3 times bigger than Facebook’s max. If you liked that trick, you’ll love this: okcupid (terrible name, I know) displays the full resolution image when you hover the mouse over any picture on the site! This is a lot more fun if you have very high bandwidth like I do (20 Mbit down at home, 80 Mbit at work). These images also appear to be stored on slower servers than the rest of OkC’s images, but it’s a very worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion. I don’t use IM on OkCupid, but if you do, try out Better OkCupid IM Windows. And finally, if you’re getting a low response rate when messaging women, plug in SuperResponse and boost it to an 80% response rate guaranteed!

OnlineWingman is a toolbar and dashboard that tracks your browsing history and response rates to help you improve your effectiveness. It doesn’t work right away, but it could be interesting to see its charts after using it for a week or two. It supports PlentyofFish and Match.com. I’m pretty disappointed that nothing else useful exists for Match and POF, the top 2 dating sites.

All you eHarmony subscribers probably wonder like I do why the hell eHarmony hates pictures so much. They show you first names as your matches, but no pictures. Am I really supposed to remember 50+ people I’ve never met by their first names? The Ultimate eHarmony Matches Table fixes this shortcoming and makes a huge improvement on the My Matches page; you’ll come to realize that eHarmony is unusable without it.

OKCupid recently unveiled MyBestFace, a feature that helps its members determine their most attractive profile pictures. You have to earn the report by voting on other members’ photos, and others do the same for yours. Each photo you post requires you to vote on 20 pairs of photos. You have to choose which person you’d rather go on a date with (and skip is not an option). According to OKCupid, this is how it works: “A group of real humans compared your photos with others’, and each time your photo was selected – or not – the information we gleaned was a complex function of how well the opposing photo did in its own report. In other words, we weren’t simply counting votes. We considered all the other votes, too, and converged rapidly on your best face.” Sounds a lot like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facemash to me.

As I voted I realized I was unfairly discriminating against certain users that were not my type. I wished I could specify demographics (at least age range) of people I voted on and people who voted on me. For example, an older woman may choose to go on a date with an older man when pitted against me, just because he’s older, which in turn reduces my score unfairly.

I was very surprised by the results of my report after running my favorite 8 pictures through it, so I decided to process more of them, and more again. Still surprised I decided to run them through a second time to determine the consistency of the results. After all, to trust the results of which photo is better than another, a photo should score higher than another in both round 1 and round 2.

I ran 44 pictures through MyBestFace twice and analyzed the numbers on a spreadsheet (update 6/22/2010 more accurate Excel version). Combining numbers from both rounds, I found that the standard deviation from one photo to another is lower than the average discrepancy between round 1 and round 2. If this is always true, that means you cannot tell which photo is better than another after only one round of comparison. Keep in mind that you have to vote on 20 photos per round per photo submitted, so submitting 44 photos twice required voting on 1,760 pairs of photos, which of course took a lot of time.

My average picture rating of both rounds was 67.36. The average difference between my picture score and 67.36 is 4.3, and the standard deviation over both rounds is 5.38. The average difference between the same photo in round 1 vs. round 2 is 5.46, which is the system’s margin of error.

Since the margin of error is greater than the standard deviation between my good and bad photos, I consider the results very inaccurate in round 1. One could argue that if I compared 2 photos in round 1 and the difference between them was greater than 5 (MyBestFace rounds to whole numbers), the higher scoring picture is indeed more attractive than the lower scoring picture. However, in the worst case scenario I had one picture jump 13 points from round 1 to round 2! And only 13.6% of my photos earned the same score in round 1 and round 2.

It would take rating another 1,760 pairs of photos to determine the reduction in the system’s margin of error after doubling the number of experiments, but I assume it would still be greater than the standard deviation from photo to photo. If that is the case, then even after 4 rounds of experimentation the system still fails to prove which photo is more desirable than another.

MyBestFace is fun to try, and it would be a very useful tool if its results were accurate, but after running this experiment I think I’m better off just asking a few friends which of my pictures are most attractive.

Today when I opened my favorite instant messaging client, Digsby greeted me with an announcement: “We’re excited to announce the launch of ChatVille, a brand new Facebook game we created for discovering cool new people! ChatVille let’s [sic] you video chat with random Facebook users in a safe environment while earning compliments, unlocking badges, and leveling up in a race to become ChatVille Champion! http://bit.ly/ChatVille_Release PS: First one to unlock the Digsby Badge gets a free iPad!”

Naturally I tried it and quickly discovered a lot of bugs. Most of the time I click Next I get an error message: “Everyone is engaged in conversation. Chat with one of your Facebook Friends or click Next to try again.” That’s not fun! The only 10 people I’ve been able to connect to so far were all men. That’s also no fun, but not unexpected. I couldn’t figure out exactly how to improve my score and couldn’t find a guide anywhere.

Soon Adobe Flash Player began to crash my web browsers. All 3 of them. This problem persisted after uninstalling and reinstalling Flash Player and rebooting my PC. Now I can’t play the game at all because Flash Player crashes the browser immediately when the game loads, while Chatroulette still works just fine.

If this game worked, it could be the solution to the booming industry’s pervert infestation. Inappropriate conduct can get Facebook users banned from ChatVille quickly and permanently. But could this be enough of a difference from Chatroulette to achieve a lower male-to-female ratio than CR’s 9-to-1?

Try it yourself: http://apps.facebook.com/chatville/

In What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis conveys his lessons learned from the greatest technology success stories of the past decade. He draws on best practices from Etsy, Craigslist, Amazon, and of course Google. I took notes of interesting, new concepts as I read but sadly didn’t end up with much. It may be great for corporate old-schoolers, who Jarvis seems to be talking to, but if you’ve been following blogs and news in this space this book will feel a little slow and obvious.

I managed to solidify a few key points that I’ll take with me as I engender my next big tech company in the next year. First, the best position is to create a platform on which others can build. I can expect to earn little or no profit for a while under this model, but hooking developers on my platform is a very powerful strategy. I need to extract the minimum value from the network of developers and related web services to take the network to its maximum potential size and value. This enables my developers and partners to charge more, which increases their dependency on my platform or network. Another positive side-effect is that competitors don’t want to jump into a space where the efficient leader’s margins are low.

Today’s web 2.0 method for growth is to forgo paying for marketing and instead create something so great that users distribute it. Later revenue can be found and extracted, but we’ve seen the revenue-maximizing strategy fail on AOL and Yahoo while Google stole their users to frame the world’s most powerful advertising machine.

These are the most powerful pieces of advice I discovered in WWGD:

How can you act as a platform?

What can others build on top of it?

How can you add value?

How little value can you extract?

How big can the network atop your platform grow?

How can the platform get better learning from users?

How can you create open standards so even competitors will use and contribute to the network, and you get a share of the value?

I’ll certainly be applying some of these principals to my next ambitious venture. As far as the rest of the book, I recommend reading a summary instead, unless you’re brand new to the Web 2.0 business world.

In my time studying Business Management Economics at UC Santa Cruz, I came to appreciate Economics as the underlying force driving many other Social Sciences, including Politics, Sociology, Community Studies, Anthropology, and History. In Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner assume this same premise to explore the hidden economic forces that connect seemingly unrelated phenomena in American society and history.

They do not argue that economics causes societal issues; rather they use economic models and experiments to explore complex issues, including racism, crime trends, abortion effects, medical malpractice, student and teacher cheating, and effects of parenting. They explore correlation and causality between distant patterns in society to convey an underlying human nature at work. In doing so they manage to prove that conventional wisdom is often wrong.

To me, the most interesting section of the book is what a bagel salesman’s data reveals about employee honesty in varying-sized companies and at different position ranks. Its findings “lie at the intersection of morality and economics,” and demonstrate consistent trends in theft, allowing the interpreter to actually predict theft within a company, given a few basic descriptions.

A bagel man named Feldman leaves bagels and cream cheese in office lounges and kitchens along with a wooden box and a sign requesting $1 per bagel on the honor system. By keeping perfect records (he’s formerly a financial analyst), he inadvertently invents a system to monitor rates of white collar crime.

At his own estranged office he receives a 95% payment rate because his colleagues knew him. But eventually he built his clientele up to 140 companies consuming 8400 bagels a week and the payment rate varied with distinct patters.

With enough data he learned to consider an “honest company” one that paid for 90% or more of its bagels consumed. 80-90% payment rate is annoying but tolerable, and if paid less than 80% Feldman posted a hectoring note. Even though as many as 20% of his clients steal bagels from him, his money box only got stolen 1/7,000 times.

The interesting part of his data is learning the factors shaping trends in honesty. Smaller offices tend to be more honest; a 50-employee company pays 3-5% more than a company with more than 300 employees, which can also be described as a reduction in theft as high as 60%. Unseasonably good weather reduces theft while cold weather has the opposite effect. The bad holidays include Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentines Day and tax week, which each invoke up to a 15% increase in theft. Holidays that reduce the theft rate include Independence Day, Columbus Day and Labor Day.

Other interesting trends include the positive correlation between honesty and employees who like their boss and work. I was surprised to find an increase in theft as you move up the corporate ladder. Feldman speculates that executives cheated because of a sense of entitlement, or that perhaps cheating is what earned their place as an exec in the first place.

The conclusion of this excerpt, however, is quite positive and inspirational: The vast majority of Feldman’s customers do not steal even though no one is watching.

Freakonomics was a very fun and easy read, and not just because of my background in Econ. It’s entertaining all the way through and there are some very interesting insights into history and the nature of certain professions that you’d never know other than by reading this book. I recommend it.

I recently gave my blog’s social interaction mechanisms a complete overhaul – again. I watched Facebook’s F8 conference live on Facebook and was immediately inspired to add the new Like Button on my blog. See Zuckerburg’s presentation if you missed it.

First I deactivated the outdated plugins, Facebook Connect, I Like This, and Sociable. I tried a number of new comment systems and plugins using Facebook’s new Open Graph Protocol, which intertwines Facebook connections with almost any content on the web and easily enables sharing the content with your friends through Facebook’s news feed. This doesn’t displace the need for Facebook Connect, but Connect didn’t improve my comment system’s interface like I hoped. There’s more interesting info about the Open Graph concept at opengraphprotocol.org.

I was surprised by how difficult it was to find blogs referring me to the best Open Graph plugins, so I had to experiment on my own. My first attempt was Sprout Venture’s Facebook Social Widgets. I installed and activated the plugins, moved the modules into my sidebar and nothing displayed so I scrapped it for Facebook Social Plugins. This plugin works like a charm. It is missing one feature that I haven’t found a replacement for yet: the ability to like my blog itself. But without any post-install work, the Like button appears below all content on my blog and shows you which of your Facebook friends liked the content. It works perfectly and I recommend it to anyone with a WordPress blog.

Next I experimented with a couple of new comment systems before deciding on Disqus. It was surprisingly easy to install and customize: Register an account at Disqus, use WordPress’s dashboard’s plugin search to find “Disqus Comment System,” install and link it with your Disqus account in its settings page. On second thought, that may not be very easy for beginners, but it provides a much better result for a lot less technical knowledge than the alternatives. I’ve set up Discuss to enable my visitors to comment using their Facebook or Twitter credentials and quickly share on the mother sites. In addition to taking out the Facebook Connect and @Anywhere integration, Disqus replaced WordPress’s ugly comment system with a much more attractive one. Hey, if my favorite blog Mashable really likes it and uses it, it’s good enough for me!

Today we met one of my favorite speakers to date, William Quigley, Managing Partner of Clearstone Venture Partners.  Quigley concentrates on its Internet and communications related investments, and gave our class a priceless education about how VC’s work, the stages involved in building a startup, how to select an industry to invest in, and how to pitch our companies to a VC.

Clearstone borrows ¾ of a billion dollars from large corporate investors to invest, and Clearstone gets to keep 25% of the profits. Quigley’s investment strategy is to invest in cold sectors because even if you have a great company, competition is what erodes profit margins; you want to be in the hot space two years before it’s hot.

He recommends using a VC because it’s really hard to go public or get acquired if there was no VC on board throughout a company’s growth to clean it up. The companies Clearstone incubates have always done much better than the people who just ask for money. A startup should always think about who would be a natural acquirer of this business; and think of others besides the usual suspects, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Companies tend to get acquired if they specialize greatly in one thing, especially if the firm does a lot of R&D, which big firms buy from startups with increasing frequency. Play in large markets because they’re very forgiving, and don’t depend on advertising revenue.

There is no shortage of money for good ideas, and you’ll need $10-100 million to build a successful company. No idea is too big to fun. For example, a WiMax business plan earned an entrepreneur $900 million of VC funding before a company was even formed! The downside to taking money from a VC is that they take control of your company. That’s not the end of the world though because the founder retains 50% ownership, no matter how much the VC puts in. That means an entrepreneur should shoot for as big an investment as possible. The pace at which you can raise capital will decide whether you’re the best in the biz or a lagger because there are always 10 other people right by you with the same idea.

The most valuable knowledge imparted on us is what a VC is looking for in a proposal, something all entrepreneurs want to know. First get their attention with a teaser PowerPoint presentation, and it’s a bonus if you already have a product or some customers. If you’re seeking less than a million dollars, go to an Angel instead of a VC. Guess market sizes and predictions when you have to because it’s a great problem when there’s no info about a market because no one’s capturing its future value yet. The CEO likes taking a modest salary so he can lead the team and say everyone’s bootstrapping together. Raise a lot of money but spend it as if you’ll never see another dime. Project revenues of years 1, 2 and 3. It takes about a month for the VC money to come through, but that’s a lot better than Angel investment time frames, where you’ll have to badger the investor for the check constantly. If one VC doesn’t like the idea, try pitching it to others. One of Quigley’s companies recently went public after getting rejected by 140 VC’s early on.

Quigley wants to believe in an entrepreneur’s vision about how the market will look in 3 years. I was surprised to hear that 75% of presenting to a VC is its entertainment value. My classmate Blake and I joked later that we ought to take up some acting classes before we approach a VC, but we will probably actually do it. The futurist must use 2-3 interesting trends or ideas about market evolution, convince the VC in his ability to recruit great talent, be informed and excited, be a great spokesman for the business, be capable of dealing with setback, and be willing to fight above his weight class. When you advertise yourself as a deep thinking in the space it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Disciplined hard work will get you there: Spend months thinking about an idea, and package it in a way that’s easy to understand; have a really novel take on a new business model; capture the economics of your business in a chart or two. VC’s only want to play with ideas in which the visionary is right and everyone else is wrong.

The most startling fact of the day is that only 1 out of 1,000 pitches actually get funding, but there are many sources of money out there and if you have a great vision, stick it out and make it happen.

Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a first-hand account of the creation of 32 of the world’s most influential tech companies. Each chapter is an interview with a different company’s founder, averaging 14 pages a piece. This gives the reader a lot of freedom to read one story at a time whenever he or she needs a little inspiration – and boy is it inspirational! Much of the time I thought, “That could totally be me!” so I took frequent pauses to blast out ideas into my Website Concepts log. The stories are often laugh-out-loud funny, and will make you wonder how the world could have possibly doubted today’s most useful technologies.

It’s interesting how much the founders have in common. For example they almost all started on a project completely different from what they ended up succeeding with. Many of them were forced to make major life sacrifices to dedicate themselves to a concept with no funding or revenue. Almost every story includes a paragraph about the time the founder had stayed awake for 4 days straight, working tirelessly on the product before launch. And rarely were their ideas embraced with open arms; instead investors, coworkers, friends, and competitors balked at them. As computing pioneer Howard Aiken once said, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

All of the founders convey great lessons learned in entrepreneurship. I will focus on a few of my favorite stories and some of the most valuable advice I picked up from their great achievements. However, I highly recommend reading it for yourself, as I consider this book highly inspirational. I will definitely flip back to one of these stories when I need a little encouragement in my own startup in the future.

Like many of the founders, PayPal’s Max Levchin is clearly a brilliant programmer and engineer, which makes it a little hard for me to relate at times. But he’s also a great entrepreneur, with valuable insight into startup success recipes. PayPal had changed its business plan six times before getting it right, which is fine because a good entrepreneur is not tied to any one specific plan. He also welcomes the challenge of being a novice in a field of experts because rather than conforming to the norm, you’re inspired to invent something. For example, Citibank competed with PayPal but, adhering to the banking norm, held tight restrictions over which users and transactions it would service in order to prevent fraud. PayPal let everyone use the system because “new users learning about a new system really don’t want to be restricted.” Instead PayPal became “a security company pretending to be a financial services company.” It judges the risk of a transaction to help it decide whether to block it or take it on. He attributes its tremendous growth rate to the world’s most powerful viral driver: money waiting for you when you sign up. Some sellers refused to accept PayPal but a buyer could still send them money through it. The seller receives an email informing him that money awaits him and naturally he registers an account. Finally, Levchin attributes his success to having a great cofounder, warning that it’s very hard to start a company completely alone.

Evan Williams founded Pyra Labs, which created Blogger.com. Initially it was a web-based project management tool for intranets, which he likens to today’s Basecamp. One of the products called Stuff enabled quick, disorganized sharing within the company. While the Pyra team considered it very useful to them, they thought it was too simple and trivial to be the product in and of itself. While there were other blogs on the internet, they weren’t taken seriously for a long time. At one point after releasing Blogger.com to the public, Pyra ran out of money and everyone except Williams quit or got laid off. This prompted the Server Fund Drive, in which Blogger’s website requested donations to keep the website live. Surprisingly $17,000 came in and saved the company. During 2001 Williams considered quitting many times but remained “hallucinogenically optimistic,” his most valuable advice. Don’t let people talk you out of your gut feelings or force you to compromise on your ideas. “If everyone agrees, it’s probably because you’re not doing anything original.” He also warns an entrepreneur to roll with the punches, because if things don’t go according to plan, you never know whether it’s good or bad until later, if ever. Deals that didn’t work out were a bummer at the time but turned out to be very lucky. Williams concludes that it’s amazing how far you can go with a simple idea.

Tim Brady was the 3^rd employee at Yahoo, after the two cofounders. He left Harvard Business School in his last semester to join Yahoo, not knowing whether they would graduate him. Originally Jerry and Dave used Yahoo to keep track of the technical papers they used in doing their PhD theses. All major EE graduate programs found out about it and send them emails asking them to add papers to the list. Suddenly they went from doing their graduate work to adding websites to their list for 8 hours a day for 8 months, and traffic grew exponentially, so they called Brady asking for help. They were offered money by the LA Times, AOL & Microsoft early on but decided to do it themselves because they had so much confidence in what they were doing. Concerning competition, Brady reflects, “Although we thought it was crazy, AOL’s walled garden was bigger than the Internet for a handful of months there, which made our strategy impossible. That was definitely a threat” Employees experienced 16- to 18-hour work days but the group of people was great so the hours were never dreaded. An embarrassing reflection was when the Yahoo team met the Hotmail founders for lunch and rejected the idea, unable to see how it could get big. Brady argues that doing business with friends was a good idea in his case, in spite of the common contradictory words of caution.

Paul Buchheit was the 23^rd employee at Google. He started companies within Google and enjoyed the benefits and minimal risk as opposed to starting them by himself. For example, he was able to learn from successful techniques in other divisions, brainstorm with very smart people around him, access expensive infrastructure for free, and receive a warm welcoming to his “crazy ideas.” He brags that he built the first version of Gmail in a single day and, by the way, also built AdSense in less than a day. One reflection involves Buchheit pulling a malfunctioning hard drive from a PC and transplanting the electronics from another drive to salvage the data. Like many other founders interviewed, he stayed up for 3 days straight prior to launch, furiously assembling and testing; and he considered normal working hours noon until 3:00 am. It’s interesting that he doesn’t know whether he would have earned any less money if he had not created Gmail and AdSense, but I get the impression he’s earned enough not to be concerned. Buchheit recalls that he left Intel for a little startup not knowing whether it would succeed because he considered it a learning experience, admitting, “Honestly, I was pretty sure AltaVista was going to destroy Google.”

Do you ever find yourself excited to respond to a news or blog post, but dread the registration process? I often begin the process and then leave the site when I discover how much info it wants from me, or when I remember that I’ll have to verify my email address and log in after I fill out 10 forms of ID.

Facebook Connect solves this problem. With it I can log in to more than 80,000 websites simply using my Facebook login credentials. It’s safe, fast and very easy to use, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month. According to Facebook’s Developers Wiki, you can expect a 30-200% increase in user registrations after enabling Facebook Connect, and see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content. The web developer can set up Facebook Connect to prompt a user to cross-post his comment on Facebook after posting to the site, encouraging viral activity. Business Insider speculates that for each story published in Facebook, a site can expect an average of 3 clicks back to the site. The website also gains access to more user demographics, and it can provide a personalized experience by pulling users’ profile pictures and other data to the front end.

Knowing its many benefits, I had to set up Facebook Connect on my own blog. The setup is a little advanced but I figured I’d write a guide to help my fellow APOC students set it up on their blog. The procedure varies depending on your platform but my guide will assume that you’re hosting a WordPress 2.9.2 install through GoDaddy.

First, make sure your server is configured to run PHP5 rather than PHP4.

• If you can access your server files via FTP, open “.htaccess” under the root directory with Notepad. If you see “AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php” and nothing referring to php4, skip to the next paragraph. Otherwise follow next bullet point.
• Log in to GoDaddy Hosting Control Center, and see “PHP Version” under Account Summary. If it already reads PHP 5.x, skip to the next paragraph. If it says PHP 4.x, click on Content, then Add-On Languages. Next to PHP Version, select PHP 5.x, click Continue, and confirm the warning. Click update. Then navigate to Settings > File Extension. If the change to 5.x has been completed, you’ll see at the bottom of the available extensions list, “Extension -> .php | Runs Under -> PHP 5.x” If it’s not there, stop here and come back in an hour or so, and when it is there, you’re ready to proceed. Thanks to ardamis for some of this info.

Log in to your blog’s Admin Dashboard. Click Plugins in the left navigation panel, and click Add New near the top. Search for “WP-FacebookConnect,” and make sure you install the one by Adam Hupp (who works for Facebook and quickly responds to emails, to my pleasant surprise). Install and Activate plugin.

Register a new Facebook application here: http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php?version=new. In your blog’s Admin Dashboard, navigate to Settings > Facebook Connect, and copy your Facebook application’s API Key and Secret into the proper fields and Update Options.

To test whether everything works, log out of your blog, attempt to comment on a post, connect with Facebook Connect and post a comment on your own story. Allow Facebook to publish the comment “story” to your Facebook wall, and then check your Facebook wall to make sure the comment published everywhere it’s supposed to.  Configure more Application settings here: http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php.

[EDIT May 8, 2010: I switched to the Disqus comment system, which I highly recommend]