Facebook recently launched a new “Facebook for WordPress” plugin allowing WordPress users to easily integrate Facebook features like mentions, comments and social publishing to their WordPress blogs.  With the plugin, you can cross-post content to your Facebook Timeline and adds some other widgets like a live activity feed, recommendations, customizable likes, “subscribe” and “send” buttons.

Obviously, Facebook is trying to attract the more than 600 million unique visitors to WordPress blogs by weaving its platform more deeply into the fabric of the blogging universe.  Google has Blogger and now, Facebook has WordPress.  Since WordPress has more “legit” websites hosted on its platform, I think this is a big win for Facebook.  I’m sure it also goes without saying that Facebook can also now start analyzing all the usage data generated by WP users who integrate this plugin.  And I’m *sure* they won’t use that data to deliver better targeted ads to users.  [/snark]

If you want to install the plugin, I don’t recommend trying to search for it from the “Plugins” tab in the WP admin area because there are a million Facebook plugins.  I would just download the plugin from here and upload it using the “add new” button.  Once you get it uploaded, the settings area explains how to set it up. There is also a more detailed explanation here.  And if you are *really* geeky, you can read the original notification on the Facebook Developer Blog here.