Facebook Reference HTML

[cahwyguy]

Title
Facebook Reference HTML

Short, concise description of the idea
Provide a short HTML syntax for referencing FB users, equivalent to the notation.

Full description of the ideaI recently had my first FB friend comment on a post. It made me realize there is no easy way to refer to him and link to his FB as I can with LJ posts. I'm suggesting

Comments

[splitcomplex]

OpenID and Facebook users can already be referenced by the user code. If you go to their profile page, their true username, of the form ext_#####, can be found; plug that in as the username when you use the code, and it will show up.

[cahwyguy]

Of course, that's (a) neither intuitive and easy, and (b) does not permit reference to users of those external sites that haven't registered over here.

[cahwyguy]

Actually, FB users don't have a user name of the form ext_######. Take a look at this pseudo-account, created for someone who commented on one of my posts: http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?userid=30367956&t=I

[gerg]

That user is ext_250657.

(ext_250657). You can find this on the profile page by looking at the username at the end of the "Memories" URL.

This isn't intuitive, so I'd probably like to see this suggestion expanded to just show "here is code to link to this user" appearing on the bottom of the profile page or something like that.

[cahwyguy]

Which is equally non-intuitive, as most people won't think to go to the profile page to find the ID; they'll just want to use the name that shows up in the link they see.

[fiddlingfrog]

So if I link to or John-Smith which John Smith do I get? Using the display name to create a link is problematic for that reason alone. Even if your friend is unique now and doesn't encounter that problem doesn't mean they'll continue to have a unique name in the future.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that linking by display name would be nice, but since display name doesn't have to be unique it presents several problems.

[imc]

Hmm. How about something of the form http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=645314383

As LiveJournal has some sort of FB integration, it might be able to pull that apart and get

[fiddlingfrog]

That could work. But now that I think about it there probably needs to be a way to separate links to the Facebook account from links to the identity (I like that term, picked it up from changelog) account here on LJ. For standard openID users that's easy, the userhead would be different, but LJ is using the basic F icon for Facebook users.