How well would “Facebook Connect” Connect?

Author: Business Beyond Reality

November 30, 2008: The day Facebook made their big press push for their Facebook Connect service, which was first announced on May 30th, 2008.

Source: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&year=2008&month=5

After the first version of the Facebook API in August 2006, enabling users to share their information with the third party websites and applications they choose and Facebook Platform in May 2007, which allowed third party developers to build rich social applications within Facebook, Facebook Connect, the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site was announced on May 2008. Facebook Connect will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook. Similair to OpenId (which was adopted by MySpace) third party developers can allow website visitors to login to their website using their Facebook ID. This “Passport” system (much like what Microsoft tried to do) will let members leave comments on third party sites –as well as identify their friends on these sites.

Source: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=108

Many Facebook Connect implementations have launched over the past several weeks. Some of the launch partners include CBS’ TheInsider.com, CNN’s the Forum, and Red Bull. Additionally, many sites have submitted their implementations, and have been approved for launch, including GlobalGrind, GovIt, and IndieGoGo.

Source: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=163

What ‘Facebook Connect’ Means for Corporate Websites

“Facebook Connect will allow corporate websites to allow users to authenticate, interact, and share with their Facebook network –all without leaving the corporate website”, says Jeremiah Owyang, Sr Analyst at Forrester Research: Social Computing who attended SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Facebook f8 Conference, July 23, 2008.

Brands that are already trying to reach the Facebook audience (white collar workers and college students) should plan on experimenting with Facebook Connect as it can bring additional social functionality to corporate websites.

Source: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/07/23/what-facebook-connect-means-for-corporations/

What the third party sites get out of these services

What the third party sites get out of these services: easy sign in for users, particularly new users. They can also use the profile data to help users create accounts at their site with little data input. The activity stream information published on the social networks includes links back to their sites. And one of the most interesting features, for Facebook Connect partners: sites can request friend lists from Facebook to help them make more connections on their own services.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002453.html

Battle for partners:

The battle for partners is intense. MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner, but rumor is that Twitter is actually integrating with Facebook first . MySpace also announced Yahoo and eBay as launch partners. To date, though, they’ve only launched with Flixster and Eventful.

This is just one more in a trend: OpenID now on MySpace, Google Friend Connect, LinkedIn’s ties with Businessweek and NYT are all examples of our social graphs (relationships) leaving the social network and spreading to third party sites.

Also, White label social network vendors (community platforms) should be thinking about how to integrate all of the above.

Virtual World Lively’s Plug Is Pulled By Google – Breaking News

 Author: Ecocandle Riel

(Brian Meeks in Real Life \ CEO at Riel Life Productions | Owner at Riel Life Productions)

At 9:04 pm Easter Standard time, one of the most promising ventures into Virtual Worlds, announced that they would be shutting down.  Lively, the Google experiment in virtual worlds, has decided that December 31, 2008 would be the end of the line for their attempt at creating a virtual world.  In their blog post, entitled “Lively No More”, “In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives. But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.”

What does this mean for virtual worlds.  I spent a fair amount of time studying Lively.  In fact, I taught myself 3ds Max in order to be able to create content for them.  It is surely a disappointment, but I don’t feel that it will have a major impact on the growth of virtual worlds.  Second Life, has continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace.  There are several other Virtual Worlds which are still in beta, and IBM is aggressively pursuing their vision.  I feel like the worst part of this news, is that it dashes the hope that someone with very deep pockets, and certainly Google would fit into that category, would dump tons of money into their virtual world, learn from the mistakes of Linden Labs, and create something vastly superior to anything now available.

In the second paragraph they indicate that they are going to focus on their core businesses.  With the global economy on shaky grounds, one can’t fault them for taking such a prudent step.  I guess that, even in a world where only our imagination limits what can be done, the realities of real world economics must still be considered.

Thanks Lively, we enjoyed our brief time together.

 

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/lively-no-more.html