Facebook Connect is beginning to materialize and we’re on the ground floor: TechCrunch readers can now use their Facebook accounts to sign in before leaving comments.
Doing so yields several benefits. Most immediately, you’ll no longer have to enter a name, email address and website manually before dropping your two cents. Just click once on the “Connect” button that sits next to the comment form and we’ll automatically detect who you are, even on return visits.
Hooking things up with Facebook also lets us display your profile portrait in miniature form next to your name in the header of comments. Your name conveniently links to your Facebook profile as well, making it easier for other commenters to get in touch with you and perhaps become your virtual friends.
But Facebook Connect doesn’t let information flow just one way. You can now post notifications of your comments to your Facebook wall whenever contributing here on TechCrunch. After hitting the “Add Comment” button, just select a type of feed item (which Facebook calls a “story”) and your friends on Facebook will have the chance to appreciate your snark and wit.
There’s a lot more that can be done with Facebook Connect to enhance the social aspects of TechCrunch, so expect to see more elaborate Facebook-enabled features in the future, such as the ability to see which of your friends are also TechCrunch readers. In the meantime, try this implementation out and let us know what you think in the comments (naturally). Suggestions about how we should expand our usage of Facebook Connect are also most welcome.
Note to Windows users: Facebook Connect on TechCrunch doesn’t play nicely with Internet Explorer 6. Use this as an opportunity to upgrade, assuming it’s within your power to do so. And if it’s not, you probably don’t want your boss noticing how much time you spend on TechCrunch during business hours anyway.
Special thanks to Adam Hupp and Josh Elman at Facebook for their help in making this happen.
Also check out the test application we developed with MySpace Data Availability back in June.
Update: You can see which of your friends have commented on TechCrunch by going here on Facebook.
pretty sweet – the walls are coming down!
Hopefully this will lead to less anonymous, irrelevant, cowardly, and or mistaken comments.
Will TC make well known commenters such as Loren Feldman or any CEO / company rebutting a TC criticism authenticate?
i happen to disagree, obviously. Not all anonymous comments are irrelevant nor mistaken. Many times, people with insider information want to make comments without letting others know who they are.
as for the coward comments, I might agree. But again, what you might consider coward could perfectly be considered as sincere (in a way that only being anonymous could allow).
and, finally, as for the “irrelevant” comments, there’s absolutely no guarantee that non-anonymous comments will be 100% relevant. As there’s no guarantee that 100% of the people have something interesting to say all of the time…
@Zach how would you selectively force someone to authenticate on a post? It seems to try and list all the people that might want to be abusive on a post would be hard to do. Even an automated process will take time to learn what is genuine criticism and what is just someone bs=ing.
God how I hate these facebook users who come in here and offer us their all great advice that leave us to nothing but his stupidity being smear all over the Internet.
Zach Weisman is a stewpid idiot dip smuck dumb whatever he comes from, he should go back.
That u are not in public view Zach, we will keep an eye on your idiotic comment.
bring down the site!
Give me a break. The walls are not coming down. Facebook Connect is completely proprietary. It’s bullshit.
I think this is one of the most heavily commented posts in http://www.TechCrunch.com.
What about MySpace or maybe OpenID login???
http://www.livbit.com
Unleash the comment deluge.
Test
easy.. and just works
TESTED!
let’s see
testing?
yes im jealous, im goin to fb right now, to find out my user and pass to share in the fun.
ConnectLocator.com – plug in
Esta es información muy valiosa! Gracias.
Wow, that was easy. I was already logged into Facebook in another tab so I didn’t even have to type my Facebook password. Slick
Hopefully the same works for me…. testing.
Cool. test 1 2 test – is this thing on?
cool. test.
Sweet!
Hmm so is this Facebook connecting or Techcrunch stepping on to a HUGE mainstream stage…Congrats!
Neat.
And so it starts….why the foreplay? Lets all get chipped!
awesome
i have always been toooooo lazy to apply for an account
Testing
hmm
Doesn’t work.
That’s cool. I will test it now. Facebook connect button looks cool. Blue f | Connect. Awesome!!
Interesting thing
Hrrrm interesting. Seeing if this works.
test
Giving it a whirl. Pretty slick, but found it slow enough to be confusing. What took many seconds needs to happen in less than a second, IMHO.
Agreed – we’re looking into making things zippier
Thanks John. Should be faster now. … see, you’re not the only ones who can make “in a relationship” jokes about Facebook
I can see the benefit for facebook for sites to use there service, but what is the benefit to techcrunch for using this facebook connect service.
It makes it easier for our readers to comment and it helps spread our content virally through Facebook. Plus, we can build out a slew of community features using Facebook data
that’s the reason you should have put in the post mark
We also wanted to be the first blog to implement FB Connect. Just look at all the comments to this post. Mostly people testing, but I bet we see more comments overall going forward.
Are you going to publish stats about the impact of implementing FB Connect on TC?
Excellent. We are looking at doing this on http://overlay.tv which would allow people to share videos from anywhere they are embedded. Commenting with it is cool too…would be cooler if it posted that I commented on Facebook though wouldnt it? (checking that)
Where’s the sign out link?
Next to the comment form where the Connect button was before you signed in.
Why don’t I see the connect button
i think it makes commeting more serious, because you post your comment as a “real person” not as a synonym like Troll1337
Use FB Connect on Govit. It’s great to see large sites embrace it.
I see it asked after I submitted. Nice! (doesnt appear to work in Firefox on Mac though – had to switch to Safari)
testing
How about doing the same with Twitter and FriendFeed. Although they didn’t make a huge deal of it, you can easily hook into their membership system. Hey you can do it for identi.ca too — same code as you use for Twitter. How about that!
We would love to hook up Twitter, identi.ca and FriendFeed – just need to find or create the proper WordPress plugins. If anyone knows of any, please let us know.
There is a FriendFeed Activity Widget for integrating FriendFeed comments. I use it and it works nice.
jea jea jea!
That’s right Kenry
This is awesome
Apart from the page loads times it’s pretty cool. Good that facebook is pushing the limits. I’d imagine openid, friendconnect, etc should be vastly improved on the back of the competition. I don’t think facebook connect will be the singular winner in this field, though certainly if this takes off better monetization will follow for them.
Interesting idea…but until I get the facebook link to link to my blog and my email. Largely useless to me. I’ll stick with ye olde log in stuff.
testing 1 2 3
@DaveWiner Good point. Doing it for FriendFeed would be mostly interesting if it actually spawned the conversation from FF right in the comments. Also I didnt know that we could use our Twitter code (we have a Twitter widget on http://overlay.tv that updates status to and from a video surface) to update identi.ca – looking into that.
Simple, well thought-out, nice implementation!
Test…
Well now very cool.
testing this!
What kind of relationship is this? complicated? open? exclusive?
Probably best described as an uncomplicated open relationship, strangely enough
interesting to see how this will all work out.
So why does it not use my Facebook Pic? Or will it populate later?
Also testing
Testing as well.
also testing.
Nice work guys!
Hey @bitpakkit – @nadavzin here. I think we should also look into identi.ca. What do you think?
Perhaps this test will be conclusive?
Really cool
Noscript doesn’t approve
Simply loading techcrunch causes it to freak out now.
http://ioj.com/...ge4ir686rdn.jpg
¿Donde queda OpenID? ¿no es la misma idea? Facebook se esta convirtiendo en el hermano mayor y nos esta viendo.
Why not OpenID, which had been there for year almost
I’ll give it a go as well.
OpenID no es una red social entonces Facebook tiene ventajas, no?
One more test, because the last one gave me a wordpress error on Tech Crunch…..something about trying to post too much…..
In case anyone else wants to explore this error i received. In my first post I clicked the Facebook connect icon.
I was shown an “avatar missing” style avatar.
I made comment (very brief), pop up appeared.
I toggled through the display options and chose the briefest option.
Clicked submit, and received a Wordpress error… something to the effect of “hold on your are posting too fast”
The post appeared in my status, but does not appear to have been posted in the comments.
It works!
Woohoo!
This is pretty neat!
Sexy… because it’s easy.
@Mark you did this with a WordPress plugin?
Yep, and Facebook plans to release it so other WordPress blogs can do the same thing
There’s a really rough WP plugin for this out there right now that this post inspired me to test out (it works but only via a clumsy widget).
Mark, do you have any idea of the release date for the FB WP plugin?
Unfortunately I dont yet
Alright, hook me up with this plugin.
Hey Mark, any idea when Facebook will release this plugin?
Still no real WP plugin available that integrates fb connect with WP, well?
This is really cool.
We need to see more of this at other places!
I assume this is going to then make a post in my facebook feed as well?
test
Do replies get posted too?
Reply
Pretty cool!