Facebook Connect’s latest evolution is a serious step forward in the way users will connect with niche online communities. FbC allows you to login or signup to a site using Facebook’s username and password. There are several advantages, our top five reason for using it for niche social networks:
- Login and Signup: As more niche communities spring up on the web, filling a massive signup form is a serious barrier to entry. With Facebook Connect you just allow the website to identify using Fb’s secure login. The whole process literally takes seconds.
Facebook Connect Login
- Onestop shop for identity: Facebook can help you manage all your identities from one control panel just like OpenId. This is Facebook’s attempt to move away from a ‘Closed Walled Garden’ to a ‘Controlled Open Garden’. Finally you can take your profile outside Facebook (Nice!). Another fantastic feature is Dynamic Privacy, control the privacy at any stage from a single control panel. Eg: You don’t want to show your picture on any network! No worries just modify it on Facebook and this will be taken care of on all networks using FbC.
Facebook Connect: Share your profile with the web
- Transparent Integration: As an owner of a social network you want all components of the site to fit in seemlessly. Facebook Connect has a fantastic user experience and integration is transparent. Unlike Google’s Friend Connect which is a a widget you can add to your website. Although the integration procedure is really simple with Friend Connect, it is visually less pleasing.
Friends Connect in Action
- Friendships throughout the web: Another advantage users won’t have to make friends with their contacts all over again. Neither will social networks will have to use microformats or any clever algorithms to suggest friends. This in my opinion is where OpenId falls down. We love OpenId at Kwiqq but feel we would have to provide the end user with Facebook Connect and OpenId.
Facebook Connect links with your friends by default
- Share via Facebook Feed: Another advantage of using Facebook Connect is that you can easily share any news from your OtherSocialNetwork.com via your Facebook friend’s feed.
Overall I’m very impressed with Facebook Connect, you can expect this on our future social networks!
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3 Comments
Very interesting. You said this was a MUST HAVE for future social networks, but how easy would this be to implement with an existing site that uses its own CMS/MySQL based member database?
Thanks for your comment Dave. I will let Chris, developer at Kwiqq respond to your question !
The Facebook API gives any application (once API Keys have been obtained) the ability to login a user to Facebook through itself. This gives a developer the ability to retrieve the users Facebook ID and bind this to the users record on the required app.
Using this and a Facebook ‘Infinite Session’ we can review their contact details, friends lists… At present this aspect of the API is under review, and there is only the standard session available. The has the restriction of normal behaviour - so if a user logs out of the Facebook application we loose the ability to monitor their profile.
Facebook takes the majority of the work away from us, as 2 lines (PHP) is all that is required to log-in through Facebook:
1) Create a Facebook API object using registered API keys
2) Use API to request user login. If the user is not logged in to Facebook they are fowarded to a Login area requesting their details, the Facebook ID is then returned to the app and login is done.
As I said the API is currently under review with different aspects of the functionality under review, one this has been completed I hope to make some samples on what we can expect from future applications.
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