Given how much has already been written about Facebook Connect, you would think that the service has been available for eons. In fact the service that was first announced in May — which allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, desktop apps or mobile devices, then broadcast what you’re doing on those sites to all of your Facebook friends — officially launched today.
Nearly 100 web sites have implemented Facebook Connect as part of a pre-launch rollout. The social networking site claims that as a result, these sites are getting 66 percent more registrations and have 50 percent more engagement. I’m not sure how they calculate this with such pin-point accuracy; it seems like marketing hocus-pocus to me. Nevertheless, the number and quality of launch partner sites is one reason why Facebook is going to get more traction compared to its rivals. These are all highly trafficked services (with few exceptions) that will help Facebook Connect become part of the social web infrastructure.
Since I, too, have written extensively about Facebook Connect already, I won’t spend any more time on it. As background, just read two of my previous posts.
There is one school of thought which says that Facebook Connect could have a direct impact on blogs and blog comment aggregators like Disqus as FC can subsume some of their functionality.
My gut is that the average site that implements this will not see a ton of sustained engaged traffic simply because users don’t have to create an account to login. If someone wants to use a site in a meaningful basis creating an account is a very small hurdle.
I could see some services get a big boost that provide services that FB doesn’t, especially in the coming year when I suspect scrappy geniuses will figure out how to make FB users lives better.
Just as in 2002/2003 the digital landscape in the next year is going to be littered with tools that the big operations don’t have time to tinker with that the crafty-class will make lemonade with.
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Well said Ted. You are exactly right. Any serious site looking for user engagement is silly to use Facebook connect Why would anyone forfeit a user for more “engagement” whatever that marketing?PR jumble means. Bloggers spent all of 2007/2008 talking up user acquisition and now sites are going to just give up on user acquisition so they could get more “engagement”; screw that a user is a user, period!
Businesses, blogs, and everyone else should NEVER EVER build a user focused business on the back of Facebook…it is just poor business! Let Facebook figure out on their own how to keep users in their clutches and make money, don’t do it for them. It is a true bait and switch going on here
Facebook launches Facebook connect service. What about OpenID ?
A user is a user, but would you rather have 10 users or 100 users? If a site can get each of its 10 members to broadcast their activities to their 200 facebook friends, and a small number of those friends learn about and engage with that site because of that exposure, and get their friends to do the same, etc etc. I think it’s a pretty good win-win for both the non-FB site and facebook. I’m just trying it out now on Joost, we’ll see how sticky it turns out to be.