A few select partner sites are beginning to roll out their integration with Facebook’s ID system through Facebook Connect. Last week, a CBS site was the first one to do so, and more are expected to go live soon. Digg will be one of them. (Other announced partners include Six Apart, ABC, CBS, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Seesmic, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, and Xobni). During a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo last week (video embedded below), Digg CEO Jay Adelson hinted at how Facebook Connect could help the social news site take “the next step of collaborative filtering” and how it is tied to the “future of Digg.”
At the most basic level, Facebook Connect will let you sign into Digg and all of these other partner Websites with nothing more than your Facebook username and password. Facebook wants to become the universal ID on the Web, and any progress it makes on that front would be a big deal in its own right. But Facebook Connect goes well beyond an ID management system. Partners can tap into all sorts of social data people put into their Facebook profiles, and actions on partner sites can be reflected back on your Facebook News Feed in a Beacon-like manner.
For Digg, Facebook Connect will help it personalize the headlines it shows to each member. During his presentation at Web 2.0 Expo, Adelson said:
We are about to add like 90 million registered Facebook users to Digg. How can I take that so your Frontpage experience is particular to you?
Adelson’s speech was about collaborative filtering and how the general, zeitgeist-type of collaborative filtering that Digg does already is merging with the more personal filtering that occurs on your activity stream in Facebook and elsewhere. He believes that the combination of the two will be particularly powerful:
It is the next step of collaborative filtering. It is the idea that instead of looking at a social network that you’ve created yourself, that you’ve entered in the names, I am going to look at all of you, everyone, and I’m going to compare you all together. I am going to find people like you and I am going to use that collective wisdom to find things that are more specifically interesting to you.
. . . When I think about the future of Digg. We have 16,000 submissions a day to the Digg platform. How are we going to take all of that data and make it interesting and relevant without this idea of the collaborative filter? Initially all we had was Diggs and buries. But I have a lot more data about how you use the data, where you come in from, and what your interests are.
Digg is already moving in this direction with its new recommendation system, which has resulted in a 40 percent increase in Diggs. But Facebook has a much richer set of data about your personal likes, dislikes, and recent activity across a broad spectrum of interests.
What Adelson is suggesting is that it is not enough to know what your group of self-selected friends and followers are buzzing about. What you really want to know is what are like-minded people buzzing about whether you know them or not. This is not a particularly new idea. (Last.fm, for instance, has been using this approach and the concept of musical “neighbors” to create personalized music recommendations for years). But what is new is the fact that a site like Digg will be able to improve its own core service by tapping into someone else’s repository of social data. And arguably, Facebook has a bigger and better repository of such data than nearly anyone else.
(Hat tip to Paul Sanchez for spotting the video).
I wonder will facebook be more popular then openid among developers..
I guess the hints that Google was the future of Digg didn’t pan out.
Yeah, the open id thing was the first idea that popped in my head. It sounds like facebook is going to be coming with that in some ways.
A really smart move by Facebook….
Great Move by Face book !
That is pretty cool what they did.
This is going to be big and not mention shoot Facebook’s already absorbent valuation threw the roof.
Extra aborbent Facebook – the thicker quicker picker upper!
Also note the collision course of Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
Facebook is the gorilla, reaching out for content via the new beacon.
Digg, Twitter, and Friendfeed have added social circles and other features. Is it too little, too late?
Do we need all of the above? or just one or two social networks?
-Dash
http://adecon101.blogspot.com/
Just checked the new FB design, its so horrible.
—
Does anyone know of any decent forums for technology startups and would be netrepreneurs to connect ?
also where I can find a list of venture capital & angel funders from the Middle East ?
Microsoft’s big investment in FB is actually beginning to make sense . . .
That means better search engine rankings and backlinks for all content creators..:-)
I wonder why Digg would want to lay its fate into the hands of Facebook? I mean they give up a big part of their independence by relying so heavily on a feature from another company…
its a smart move….
There must be money coming Digg’s way for them to do this. It adds little value to Digg, and in fact, may diminish the relationship it has with its users, and make it more dependent on Facebook in the future.
You have to be NUTS to trust your business to facebook, let alone have facebook control log in’s around the web…crazy stuff. Man the company is creepy and pure evil. Why would Digg place its fate in facebook’s hand..i smell the papal mafia (silicon valley’s elite) puling lots of strings here.
Wow, everyone is pro this right now. What if I don’t want FB to be my universal ID? To me it’s a destination site, not the web itself. I want more anonymity than that particular statement is trying to offer. I doubt I’m alone in this thought in the rest of the world.
Information overload! No thanks!
something about who you are:
http://neoviky....ho-are-you.html
…….and the biggest, most disruptive idea in the world to upstage google….
http://neoviky....08/09/inet.html
Do not go to this site. Do not waste any of your time. It is pie-in-the-sky, pure bull shit that makes no sense whatsoever. I think the kid is partially retarded or a practiced snake oil salesman.
Just an FYI.
I think this is a great move for Digg. Getting into Facebook is going to get them more exposure and more people will want to use it.
Very cool… this idea has legs…
Since FB was designed from the beginning as a recreational destination rather than a revenue generating platform, they invariably end up having to leverage their members’ personal information to monetize their site. In this case, an FB member is asked to sign in to to a partner site with their FB id. By doing this, FB considers their member to have consented to the release of all their personal FB data to the FB partner site. I’m not sure this is what most FB members really want to do. It’s one thing for a platform like FB to leverage non-personal data and trends. It’s quite another thing if *my* personal info with my personal name and my personal friends in my personal network is openly shared by FB with its partners in order to generate cash from relevancy articles and advertising. At the very least, FB just got a lot less fun for me. I have to worry about it now. There’s a kind of violation feeling to it.
I think I’ll keep my ID’s separate – thank you.
To say that the future of your company is directly linked to the success of another company who themselves have not proven to be financially sustainable is borderline retarded.
I’m not exactly sure how Facebook Connect works but this move seems to put an additional layer between Digg and its users. I imagine that this will commoditize the Digg value proposition especially if Facebook gains Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, etc as partners (and if I was Facebook, this is exactly what I would do.) Stop trading in sound business building techniques for cheap access to more users.
Smart move, my ass.
i hate those plugins on facebook where they can steal all your information and put you on emailing spamlists…
FUCK FACEBOOK.
Facebook becoming a central login passport is the worst thing to ever happen to the internet.
Facebook IS the worst thing to ever happen to the internet…PROBLEM, they have bloggers like techcrunch in their pockets!
Facebook is bound to its worst tendencies of what they already have given plenty of hints before.Abusing the Privacy of its constituency and generators of its main content:People.
Really nice news for users.
Am i the only one who see’s this as nothing more than Beacon 2.0? You remember what happened to that, right?
Most people i know have a hard enough time following every cough and sneeze announced in the fb news feed. I can’t even imagine what would happen if they started bringing in outside content.
Also, It boggles my mind that (aside from the established media companies) 3/4 of the “select” partners mentioned have no consistent (if any) revenue streams. IMHO, the majority of the companies on that list need to stop worrying about integration into other sites, and figure out a way to make money. Perhaps if they did that, they wouldn’t need to tap into everyone else’s platform as a primary means of growth and expansion.
All that said…. i do agree 110% that the next wave needs to focus on personal relevancy in all aspects of content delivery.
funny how people are quick to dis this w/o understanding the details…
facebook connect simply provides a site with the user’s Facebook ID and the FBID of their friends, which can be used just like a unique username and/or email address.
this results in a much lower barrier to entry for users, which should result with more engagement in your app. that’s a win-win for facebook, users and developers…
but it’s also probably a huge loss to openid
Jay Adelson is a spin doctor only at Digg to sell it, that is his job and he does not care about Digg any more than I think Kevin Rose does. They just want to sell it and get out. How can you trust anyone that is only there to sell something?
Jay and Kevin, if you had any foresight you would be adding Google Friend Connect not FaceBook. This is an appples and oranges combination. What, you think after you kick eveybody out you can go regain your market thru FaceBook?
Here is my comment:
You are really starting to piss me offfff!
Quit Spamming!