How To Integrate Web Video Into Your Facebook Fan Page

When I set out to integrate TechWeb TV video into our InformationWeek fan page on Facebook, I was surprised to find no way to do it, unless your video is hosted on Facebook itself or on YouTube. Fortunately, a company called ffwd.com volunteered to build a tool for us. It works great, and you can use it too.We got together with ffwd.com (they pronounce their name "fast forward") in a marriage made by Twitter. I set out one day more than a month ago to find something I was sure must exist: An app for integrating non-YouTube videos onto a Facebook fan page. I figured there had to be a lot of demand for something like that; lots of organizations and celebrities have video, and a lot of that video is not hosted on YouTube. We use a service called BrightCove to host our video.

But I didn't find anything. You can easily integrate Facebook videos into your fan page, or YouTube videos, but you can't integrate videos from other services.

I can't say I was surprised. I'm forever stumbling over these kinds of gaps, confusing points (I still don't feel like I have a good grasp of when to use a fan page and when to use a group), and bugs when using Facebook. It's a just plain badly designed service. And that's part of its genius-Facebook discovered that people are so hungry to connect that they'll use badly designed tools to do it.

I posted a casual comment to Twitter, asking my friends there whether they knew of any tools to integrate third-party video into Facebook. And ffwd.com-a company I had, at that point, never heard of-stepped forward to volunteer to do the job.

It took several weeks for ffwd.com to build the app. Most of that time was due to delays on my end-it sometimes took me several days to respond to e-mails from the incredibly patient ffwd.com team, plus I went on vacation for a week during that time. My colleague Fritz Nelson did most of the work discussing implementation details with ffwd.com.

And now it's done, and it's been running smoothly for a couple of weeks. You can see the results on the InformationWeek fan page. It does exactly what I wanted it to do, which is very simple: It grabs a feed of videos from BrightCove, and puts those videos on the fan page Wall, interspersing them in chronological order with other Wall content, which are headlines to articles, links to reports and other premium content, and the quote of the day.

By putting the videos on the Wall, the videos-and all the other InformationWeek fan page updates-shows up on the News Feed of InformationWeek's fans, along with updates from their friend and other pages they're fans of. The videos include a headline and description.

Neat.

Here's a link to the app, which you can install yourself on your personal page or fan pages that you run. The source can be YouTube, BrightCove, or an RSS feed. You can set the video to link to an external page when clicked, or just play in-line on the Facebook page (which is what we did).

We hope you find the app useful, and thanks to ffwd.com for building it to our spec.

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