Not wasting any time jumping on new announcements and technology from Facebook, USA Network has announced that they’ve successfully integrated Facebook’s recently released set of Social Plugins, with the ultimate goal of driving increased user/player connectivity and interaction.
Powered by Open Graph, Facebook’s new Social Plugins including the Like button, activity feed, and recommendations are designed to bring friends, social activity, and relevant interaction to any site outside of the Facebook platform. Naturally, this technology depends on administrator interaction, but given Facebook’s massive popularity and market penetration, administrators of small blogs to massive portals alike are most likely to jump on these tools. These Social Plugins, as the moniker suggests, are plugins that are embeddable social features that can be easily inserted to any snippet of HTML. Consumers are already familiar with the “Like”-ing process on Facebook itself, friends’ status, photos, brands, etc.., and they will now have this same ability anywhere across the web. By quickly integrating this new technology, USA Network hopes to capitalize on spreading their message.
Coinciding wit this new integration, USA Network is re-launching their gaming portal, Character Arcade. Character Arcade uses Facebook Connect technology to not only provide login credentials, but to get friends and connections gaming together. If a player challenges a friend to a USA Network game, the system will determine whether or not that user is already a member of Character Arcade and will send a personalized invitation via Facebook based on that friends’ status.
USA’s goal is to continue to push boundaries, drive innovation and provide our fans the ability to access our content anywhere at any time,” said Jesse Redniss, vice president, digital. “By integrating Facebook’s new tools that drive social, personalized experiences, we’re offering consumers the kind of interaction, power and connectivity they crave. We’re also driving the way brands interact with these fans – building a more impactful two-way channel of communication that will ultimately change the way we approach other parts of our business.”
This information is still ‘rumored’, but sources on both sides of the fence have given the proverbial nod and smile when asked about it. Traditionally, the two friend destination sites have been bitter rivals, competing tooth and nail for number of registered users, activity on the site, etc.. However, 2009 has seen a rapid cooling off between the two, and Facebook has clearly won out, and is now kind of the social networking hill. Assorted news and rumors started appearing back in October with the U.K. Telegraph news outlet 
