We’re very pleased to announce a new feature landing on Crowdmap this week: Facebook Open Graph support. This feature allows you to share your activity on Crowdmap with your friends and family on Facebook in real time.

 

 

This means you can now effortlessly share news and information about the world and events around you with those closest to you. No needing to hit share buttons or write messages — when you view a deployment or read a report, it’s automatically shared in a elegant, non-invasive fashion. For deployers this opens up an exciting new opportunity for getting your information out to the world. Users who opt in to Open Graph share their experiences with their social graph, and as their friends and family engage, the experience is spread outward. “Going viral” is a buzzword thrown around a lot these days, but it’s never been easier to spread the word thanks to Open Graph.

Linking your accounts

1. Login to your Crowdmap deployment.
2. Select “Manage Your Account”.
3. Click “Login with Facebook” and authorize our app.

After enabling this feature, public reports or deployments you visit will be shared on your Facebook profile. This feature is not deployment specific and applies to your Crowdmap account across the entire network. We never share information from private deployments. The option to enable this is currently limited to Crowdmap accounts that are members or administrators of a deployment. We’ll be extending this feature to all users in the near future.

How do I stop sharing?

Simply remove our application from your Facebook App Settings page. We’ll pick up the change and immediately stop sharing your activity.

Your privacy is important to us We realize that some users may be uncomfortable with the idea of linking third party services with their Crowdmap account, and we entirely respect this. This new feature is completely optional and you will never be required to enable it. We also want to assure you that we do not store or share any information from your Facebook account. Our application accesses only a bare minimum amount of profile data in order to properly authenticate your ownership of the account, nothing more. That data is not saved on our servers.

Next steps

This is just a first step. We plan on expanding our social networking integration considerably in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned! This feature may be considered for implementation in future Ushahidi platform releases.