Facebook Connect - to use or not to use

Facebook Connect - is it really viable?

With lots of media coverage recently, and as Facebook prepares to roll out it's new Facebook Connect technology to even more sites, questions have begun being asked about privacy, and if Connect is going to be another flop like Facebook's now reknown Beacon technology.

For those of you that have been living under a rock for the past few weeks, Facebook Connect is a new way for users to login to other sites, such as CNET.com and Digg, using their Facebook credentials. It is basically a competitor to the now well utilised OpenID service, which is used on many sites including Yahoo! and is open source. The idea is that eventually we will only have one login (eg. We would login to all sites using our Facebook account if Facebook has it's way) instead of the many that we have today for each site.

Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social. They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, told the NY Times.

Unlike OpenID however, Facebook Connect is sure to have some way of creating financial revenue for Facebook. In a world where advertising on social networks is not making very much money, Facebook will most likely use the data gained from your profile to show adverts more suited to you, and could even allow other web sites to use your data to show targeted ads that suit you. Facebook could, in theory then see what you are doing (i.e. what sites you are visiting) and use that information to find ads on their own site that suit you more. Facebook denies that they will even consider doing this (You can read the full article here) and says that the service will 'naturally bring more users to Facebook, and thus more ad clicks. It remains to be seen just how Facebook plans to make money, but this could provide an interesting solution.

In a move which is set to plunge other competitors such as MySpace into a struggling abyss, Facebook will launch on sites such as Twitter (at least rumour has it) before MySpace, leaving MySpace with a catch up game to play. Facebook have also kept Google out of the circle by stopping their Friend Connect service from being able to access the Facebook API. This means that most of Facebook Connect's competitors have been left behind, leaving Facebook with a door wide open.

Since the disaster of Facebook Beacon, senior staff and executives have slowly introduced Connect, which launched mid last year, but has only now begun to gain lots more traction and integration with more services. Desperate to avoid another disaster, selling Connect as a great privacy tool. This for the moment anyhow, is true, and Facebook is at least for the moment working with all the partner sites to create a secure environment.

So far for you and me, the users of Facebook Connect, it seems to be a win-win situation. We get a single login, and don't have to register every single site we visit, plus we can control our privacy settings. If things stay this way, then we have alot to look forward to. However, it's highly unlikely that Facebook would just give this away, and not have some plan to make money from it. If they do decide to make money out of it, trouble could begin again. But for the moment, you'd be mad not to use it - although if you're not already a Facebook member OpenID is probably best.

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