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

[boredinsomniac]

Previous suggestions regarding LJ clone sites:
http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/1011823.html
http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/836161.html

[cahwyguy]

For LJ clones, yes, but the real focus of my suggestion was Facebook and Twitter, as there may be more references there thanks to other recent changes. Admittedly, the same syntax might work.

[boredinsomniac]

Yeah, that's why I didn't reject your suggestion as a duplicate. I just wanted to include links to discussions of the LJ clone aspect, since it is a part of your suggestion and might be rehashed here.

[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.

[ursamajor]

I like the idea of LJ supporting user-links to Facebook and Twitter and other social sites, so +1 to that part of the OP's suggestion.

I know that referencing Dreamwidth is pretty much a guaranteed poisonous drama-llama in news these days, but I like the syntax they use over there:

username site=website.com>

where the site= part is optional, and website.com could, for LJ's purposes, be substituted with facebook.com, or twitter.com, or dreamwidth.org or insanejournal.com, or heck, even wordpress.com or blogspot.com.

I know long-term LJ users won't like the idea of changing the syntax that much, so maybe just adding the site= attribute to the existing syntax would work better:

<strongusername site=website.com>
I think it's more expandable and sustainable than the originally suggested version, which suggests that all non-LJ people in the future will be "fbusers," when the latest changes have embraced Twitter, too. At some point, the website has to be referenced; otherwise, how do you distinguish ursamajor.dreamwidth from ursamajor.

[cahwyguy]

I'd have no problem with the "site=" approach -- I'm looking for a solution to the problem here, and am not emotionally tied to my specific approach.

Regarding the edit, at minimum they have a full name or a profile#. I would think this would be whatever name they give if they were to attempt to log into LJ.

[jai_dit]

Facebook users have a userid, yes. It's the string of numbers after "/profile.php?id="

[mlady_rebecca]

I like your suggested formatting to linking to other sites, in general:

username

Personally, I'd exclude Facebook from that list. People still don't understand that there is a large number of users who want LJ and Facebook identities to be entirely unconnected.

[fiddlingfrog]

I prefer the " link module" approach to this one. The name we see displayed here on LJ isn't unique, there could be a dozen "George Romero"s who have decided to log into LJ. If we went the other direction and tried to indicate the username on Facebook we have to remember that not everybody has signed up for a username; lots of people are still referred to by number like "100000386230765", so a reference to the Facebook username only half solves the current situation.

[cahwyguy]

That would provide a way for other systems to refer to LJ. I don't see how that suggestion fixes the problem of when I'm writing a post on LJ, referring to a FB user with a referance that makes it clear they are on FB (for example, from a recent journal entry of mine, done via brute force:

[fiddlingfrog]

Oh, I see what you mean now. The link module would provide an easy way to link to external users who have already created their account here on LJ, but wouldn't do anything for what you want to accomplish.

[azurelunatic]

Unless Facebook implemented it too.