Facebook Responds To MySpace With Facebook Connect
Michael Arrington
109 comments »
Facebook will announce later today Facebook Connect, which has similar functionality to MySpace Data Availability, announced just yesterday. The actual product won’t be released for at least a few weeks, so the timing on this, coming immediately after MySpace, is somewhat suspicious.
It is essentially a new version of their API for third party websites, which was first launched in August 2006.
It will allow users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any website. Third party websites will be able to implement and offer more features of the Facebook Platform off of Facebook – the same features available to third party applications today on Facebook.
To make data portable, Facebook believes it’s about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings. The next iteration will be available publicly within the next several weeks.
One of their initial launch partners will be Digg.
I spoke with Ben Ling, Director Platform Product Marketing, and Ruchi Sanghai, Product Manager for Facebook Platform, this afternoon about the upcoming changes.
Facebook Connect has four primary features:
- Trusted Authentication – Anywhere during the user’s experience that the developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted. This is a proprietary authentication mechanism, but is more streamlined than the existing method and will not require a redirect back to Facebook.
- Real Identity – Users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the open Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.
- Friends Access – Users will be able to take their friends with them wherever they go on the open Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites, and will be able to show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.
- Dynamic Privacy – As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date.
Facebook connect is Facebook’s first honest attempt to allow access to Facebook user data outside of Facebook itself. The company is describing it as giving third party applications access to much of the same data as Facebook applications have today. We’ll know more in a couple of weeks when it formally launches.
Update: Facebook has announced Facebook Connect on its developer blog.
Glad you are making up for the lack of FB stories these past few days
Pretty clever of Facebook. I don’t know that I’d bother personally, although I can see where it could give one a head start in building a profile. But at the same time, I don’t necessarily want to be interacting with exactly the same people everywhere. Just have to see how flexible it is.
Wow, that was a quick response to MySpace… I love data, bring it on!
“Network Pages will be discontinued soon
Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from the site. Please keep this in mind when communicating with others on the Wall and on the discussion board. You can use Groups to connect with the people around you.”
Does anybody else find that odd? Go visit a Facebook network page… They are doing a lot of weird stuff lately, not sure what it all means…
Wow, I didn’t expect this announcement so fast. I’m really enjoying the competition.
Oh thank God. I’m tired of having to rebuild my social network every few months on yet another platform. I sincerely hope they have a decent list of partners at launch.
This could be totally game changing if done correctly.
Interesting. What’s the over/under that the privacy isn’t bullet-proof just yet and everyone’s data gets leaked?
I am still missing distributed data storage of our own personal information, that would be real good news.
While face book rules, I am not sure we are ready to commit only to facebook as the main networking site.
We’ve not heard anything about it at the DataPortability project - are they using open standards? I know that MySpace’s data will be using open standards - particularly Microformats and OAuth to do the work - that’s what makes it so special.
What is proposed above is not open standards but lock-in for the Facebook platform to be managing all your contacts and permissions. Open Standards are needed and actually avaliable for use so that people can do this on what ever platform they trust as their ‘home base’ - hopefully now this is all happening the open standards that can do this will get some attention - XRDS along with XRI & XDI - they are at OASIS and provide service discovery (XRDS) fine grained addressability of data along (XRI) with access control (XDI). They are not ‘just standards’ but have been implemented by ooTao http://www.ootao.com and a network of partners for a large international women’s network.
All of this of course makes for an even more interesting conversation next Thursday at the 2nd Data Sharing Summit on Thursday. http://www.datasharingsummit.com
I think this is a good idea.
1) I use facebook.
2) I hate being alone.
3) Now my friends are with me where ever i go.
Seems like a win to me.
Not exactly earth-shattering — arguably predictable, really — but required and shrewd, none the less.
It’s the execution Facebook’ll be judged on, so let’s see what it’s all about.
I can see the slogan now: Facebook is anywhere you are.
And so will their platform, presumably…
This has potentially far reaching implications for app developers.
Done properly, this makes the transition from app to the web go much more smoothly.
May not be as open as the data portability standards, but it would still be very useful to FaceBook developers who want to build supporting websites in additon to their apps. Now they just have to make sure the people using this system aren’t going to do anythng malicious with the data.
I applaud Facebook (and MySpace too, for that matter) for moving towards a more open world and recognizing the rights a user has to his or her data. I am somewhat skeptical, however, of the need for yet another proprietary solution for interacting with the rest of the world — especially when significant work has already been accomplished via that Data Portability initiative (among others). Nevertheless, one step forward is better than no step — and it does represent a significant shift from prior positioning. I can only hope that regardless of any proprietary components behind the scenes that they all find a way to participate, play nice, and help evolve the existing and emerging standards.
As Kaliya stated, I’m afraid that this is just another strategy for Facebook to “lock-in” their users and attempt to become the central repository of everyone’s social graph. If that’s the case, this is not data portability as I still don’t have full control over my data.
Hopefully, they’re going to be fully supporting open standards, but I doubt it. Facebook strikes me as a company that pretends to be open, but is only open one-way or to the extent that they can control.
Facebook is Microsoft 2.0
This is MASSIVE - it is an extension of federated identity and trust models for third party sites. Leveraging a users existing reputation within a known social network has huge benefits.
I know we are going to be all over this!
Way to go Facebook - thanks TC for reporting it.
Cheers - Eric
Surely a website could be made that transforms this data into nice semantic data?
Surely we could already write a site like that come to think about it…
This is good, but since it’s based on a proprietary standard it doesn’t help the effort of making the web better. It only makes the web better for facebook and it’s partners.
That’s why open standards are so important.
Wow that was fast from FB. Open std are so important.
Sounds great! What a week! Of course, as with the MySpace announcement, the details will be important. Hoping to see open standards in the mix.
Clever way to avoid supporting OpenID
Anybody remember when you could do stuff on the web anonymously?
I like the idea of being able to leave stupid comments on Digg without it being tied to a mountain of personal information, no matter how “secure” they try to make it.
woah! can’t make openID anymore..
#4 Josh yea, i just saw that..
“Network Pages will be discontinued soon
Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from the site. Please keep this in mind when communicating with others on the Wall and on the discussion board. You can use Groups to connect with the people around you.”
What will happen now? No more networks, does that mean, anyone can see my profile? Holy cow, if they do that, then Facebook will be like MySpace. Or does that mean, they are just removing the Network pages a.k.a Spam Market.
Federated Social Data Networks (FSDN): MySpace vs Facebook…
Looks like we will have two or more federated social data networks soon. This is interesting… like federated identity managers that allows each user to define his/her own rules on whom and what to share between sites.
What is needed is an ability for one site (say MySpace) to import data from a second site (say Facebook or orkut).
Now that would truly be awesome!
It would be more impressive if they let you set levels of information to be shared with other sites. Until then, too dangerous.
“The more you tighten your grip, Facebook, the more star systems, er, users, will slip through your fingers.”
That’s amazing! BTW I though Myspace was old News? Most people here deleted their myspace accounts after facebook got big.
Big leap forward for facebook and other sites with this announcement.
The big news is that this will encourage even more people to use facebook since facebook could become a popular verification and friends portability mechanism.
Imagine all your friends digging stories you dugg when you can pull them into digg and easily see what they dugg???
Cheers!
Rodney Rumford
More thoughts here:
http://facereviews.com/2008/05.....ortability
It’s great to see FB make this move. As we showed with FriendCSV and data imports on bigsight.org, FB has long allowed third party sites to do just what they are announcing now; however, it appears as though the process will be streamlined a bit more, which is great. I doubt that this will move incredibly fast, though…it seems more like a quick response to MySpace.
A big key here that people don’t seem to be paying attention to is that the “networks” pages are disappearing. Who knows what this is about…
I agree, this is very interesting even though there doesn’t seem to be all that much new functionality yet. I always had a feeling that the internal Facebook vision/mantra was to push towards someday having a blue bar at the top of every page that a user browses on the internet.
I have to disagree however that this was rolled out solely because of the MySpace Data Availability announcement. This seems to be a shift in strategic direction from the usual “walled garden” approach, which would have required a bit more time (although it could have been motivated by advance knowledge of the MySpace initiative).
A big key here that people don’t seem to be paying attention to is that the “networks” pages are disappearing. Who knows what this is about…
That is right Dan #33, I am now worried that they might open up all network, so that you can see everyone’s full or semi full profile which might create a whole “pedophilic”environment. That may be the reason why they made a Safety and Privacy deal few days ago. Wow..if that is true..things will start getting scary.
It seems as if other social networking sites and social media platforms are working towards building an ecosystem across the web, aiming for open standard initiatives. At the same time, this looks like Facebook is trying to control those open social initiatives.
Should Facebook execute this properly, it could be really beneficial for the end user, even if they have more control over user information. But is it worth it?
I think this is an awesome move for them. I wanted this from Open Social, and asked Kevin Marks for it. I didn’t get it.
Facebook is giving it to me soon, and I love it. I think it will really allow for mashups to begin integrating data on a completely new level.
Nice move. Open interconnectivity is the way to go!
I believe in the general truth of the maxim that “change tends to be overestimated in the short term, but underestimated in the long term”. This is why early adopters often don’t make the big bucks but instead set the table for those with deep pockets that later do. That having been said, in this world of reduced product cycles (see how each company is coming out quickly with similar services right on top of each other’s announcements — it is the law, I believe, of “accelerating returns”, which, as has been detailed for example by Ray Kurzweil, which explains that the rate of change itself is increasing) innovation and speed and depth and integration of innovation become ever increasingly the key competitive advantages.
That was fast, FACEBOOK ROCKS!!!!
MYSPACE ROCKS!!!!!!!
Looking forward to trying this out.
A big double walled garden is still a walled garden…
Open standards are great in theory. And would be good in practice. The problem is outside of developer/geek circles no one “gets it” or cares. I think that’s what we sometimes don’t see around here often times.
The average user does not feel any pain or see any reason to move toward a service with open standards. They don’t understand the purpose and are not motivated to join a service because it is “open”. And I don’t see any way that is going to change.
So open standards, OAuth, whatever… sounds good but likely won’t work. It is more likely that a single company…. Facebook, Google, etc. is going to be successful with lock-in strategies. Developers will meanwhile have to accept that you will have to independently support multiple APIs to tie into one or a few identity providers that control the social grid.
Good news for the users. We need a Data Availability as soon as posible.
I’m really glad to see this! One of the things I love about Facebook is that their products tend to actually work… I’ve been extremely frustrated with just about everything Myspace and OpenID hasn’t worked for me either..