Facebook Connect and Wordpress, sitting in a tree…
I’ve read quite a bit about Facebook Connect lately – the service that lets sites allow Facebook users the convenience of authentication via their existing Facebook account details:
This implementation by “news mashup” Buzz Newsroom caught my interest as it manages to combine 2 of the things I love most about the web: the ability to build applications by linking different components and content sources together, and collaboration – or the (so-called!) “wisdom of the crowds”. Here’s how techcrunch describes it:
“You sign in with Facebook Connect, and then can not only vote up or down any story, but write your own entry.
Buzz Newsroom is a big Wordpress blog. You start off as a contributor, which means you can author posts but not publish them. Buzz Newsroom editors review the entries and publish them. Once you become a trusted contributor, your status may be upgraded to “author,” which means you can publish directly.”
Once you are connected to Facebook (from another site) you have instant access to all of your friends, and although it’s hard to see this openness by Facebook as an entirely selfless gesture it certainly does seem to have some advantages for us too. Not least the convenience of being able to login to a site without having to create and manage another user account. (N.B. Facebook aren’t the only ones to recognise this and it would be wrong not to mention the Open ID project at this point, with which Facebook recently got involved). It could also help to reinforce brands – a user’s activity on a site can be published back to the Facebook news feed for all their friends to see. And of course, a visiting Facebook user potentially brings many new visitors with them – or as the Facebook site explains:
“With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites” – et voila, instant social network!
Sources:
http://developers.Facebook.com/connect.php
http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/Facebook-connect-implementations/
Category: Marketing, Social, Social Media, Technology, Web Comment »