02 Dic Facebook Connect Goes Live
PC Magazine, By Michael Muchmore, December 1, 2008
This past July during its f8 developer conference, Facebook announced a new platform that would allow their users to “bring their Facebook account information, friends and privacy to any third party website, desktop application or device.” Called Facebook Connect, the service means users can sign in to participating sites with their Facebook ID, which is usually associated with their real name. Users of the service can bring profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, and groups to the new site. As of Monday, the Facebook Connect technology is now live. The move advances the concept of “data portability,” which includes portability of privacy settings. You may not, for example, want every site you visit to know who all your friends are, and for them to know every site you’re visiting. Data portability does ease the problem of having to repeatedly enter information for every site you want to join. Facebook’s approach to this is proprietary, whereas MySpace accomplishes the single sign-on using the OpenID, which is also supported by Google and Microsoft. The support from these major vendors gives the standard a potential base of hundreds of millions of users. MySpace’s version of data portability, dubbed “Data Availability,” is also more open than Facebook Connect. The move was chronicled in an extensive article in The New York Times yesterday, which also discusses the similar efforts at MySpace, Google, and Yahoo. Facebook Connect partners already include the SixApart blogging sites, Digg, CitySearch, and Twitter. At the f8 conference, the company also announced that support for iPhone apps was also in the works. A feature that could be attractive to many Facebook users is the ability to deliver News Feed items such as requests and notifications via the third-party sites. The technology will be showing up on partner sites in the next few weeks, but meanwhile, Facebook has made available a demo site called The Run Around to show how it works.