Vodpod Blog

We’ve finally gotten around to re-building our Facebook app. Our new Facebook app is simple, elegant, and exactly the thing you’d want if you like to share videos on Facebook with your friends.

If you use Facebook, get it now! Details on how to install the new app are below, along with an overview of what has changed.

We first built a Facebook app two years ago, when the initial Facebook application platform was launched. We attempted to build as much of the core Vodpod functionality as possible into that first app. That approach proved hard to maintain and was overly complicated; as a result the Vodpod Facebook app was the poor step-sister in our family of publishing tools.

The new Vodpod Facebook does one thing, and it does it well — it puts a nice looking entry in your Facebook feed (video thumbnail, title and your comment) whenever you add a video to your Vodpod collection:

If this is so simple, why is it so great? Because your friends will actually see when you’ve added a video, and they’ll be more likely to watch what you’re collecting. And, because Vodpod allows you to share your favorite videos with a click from more than 10,000 different sites, they’ll be able to see all your favorites (and not just the videos you like on YouTube or DailyMotion). Over the past week, I’ve noticed that my Facebook friends are watching — and commenting on — videos I add far more frequently than they did with our old application.

It’s just three quick steps to install. Go to your Vodpod home page, and under the “share and publish” menu on the right, click Facebook and then click the “Connect with Facebook” button at the top of the page.

You’ll see three quick screens asking you to give our new app various permissions in order to publish items to your Facebook feed.

The first screen asks you to allow access for the Vodpod Facebook app — just click the big blue “Allow Access” button:

The second screen asks for permission for “Offline Access” — which means we can publish to your Facebook page even when you’re not logged in and using Facebook. Click “allow offline access.”

The final step asks is a simple permission to allow us to publish content to your feed — click “Allow Publishing”:

We’ll take you to your Vodpod account page to confirm the application is installed — you should see a screen that looks like this:

That’s it, with those quick steps the Vodpod Facebook app is installed. Next time you add a video to your Vodpod collection, you’re Facebook friends will see it in their feed.