Lonely Planet Labs

Facebook Connect live

Katie MarcarLonely Planet author

This fortnight’s release to Lonelyplanet.com is exciting for us because it marks the launch of our Facebook Connect initiative, which lets Facebook members sign up to lonelyplanet.com and participate in our community without a separate log in (and then published their LP activity back out to Facebook).

Below are highlights of the changes introduced, and here’s a video demo of the changes.

A big thank you to our development team who have worked for the past 3 iterations (6 weeks) on this functionality. It was a complex task and covered some tricky parts across our website (user registration/sign on / profiles) and some even trickier challenges wrestling with Facebook’s API.

Here’s a roll call of some to the significant changes we made to lonelyplanet.com

• New and existing users can connect their Lonely Planet account with their Facebook account at sign in and from within their profile management screens.
• When connected with Facebook anything they do in Thorn Tree or groups will be pushed out to be visible on Facebook to your network. Like this!

• Users registering with Lonely Planet the original way now have an option to opt in to our Comet and special offers newsletters. This used to be a separate form – since combining these we have seen a distinct uplift in Newsletter sign ups.
• We now have pagination in our Blogs we Like pages, to accommodate the ever growing content from our equally growing community of bloggers.
• We added links from the global footer to a ‘Follow Us’ page – promoting our Flickr, Twitter and Facebook streams.

Cheers
Katie
Global Website Manager