Not an hour after Google announced the general availability of Friend Connect, Facebook is doing the same for its competing Facebook Connect service. Now any third party website that wants to pull personal data about visitors from Facebook – and send back activity reports to their news feeds – can do so by first filling out a self-service application.
The general availability of Facebook Connect comes only a few days later than our anticipated launch date of November 30th. The service was originally announced last May, just one day after MySpace announced its data portability initiative called Data Availability and just a few days before Google announced Friend Connect.
The three horse race between Facebook, Google, and MySpace to achieve dominance in the internet identity space doesn’t appear to be letting up any. It isn’t a mere coincidence that both Facebook and Google have announced their public launches on the same day; both are struggling to establish themselves as the de facto standard for both developers and end users. MySpace managed to beat out both Facebook and Google months ago when it publicly launched its service.
While Facebook Connect is now available to all developers, we have yet to see live implementations from many of Facebook’s supposed launch partners, a few of which were highlighted during this summer’s F8 conference.
We rolled out Facebook Connect on TechCrunch yesterday.
Update: Here is Mark Zuckerberg’s post on the news.
I don’t think GFC stands a chance in the long run.
Agreed. Facebook will clearly win this game. OpenID is going to die.
Facebook is the way to go. Google has no chance.
They must have got some insider tip. Nice move by both parties.
, nice omccmet hello
nice presentation about facebook and its potential here:
http://www.slid...type=powerpoint
Are there any sites that use Facebook Connect?
Try click on the “Facebook Connect” button near the bottom of this very page
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Check out http://www.howcast.com – we have a live Connect implementation.
http://vlane.com/ is up and running with Connect, too.
Yes, VLane’s Connect implementation is very good.
http://www.govit.com is using Facebook Connect
http://addresstory.com/ is using it as well…
@ T Ferguson, try Hulu.com, Citysearch, Digg
test
@nick Testing, too
Seems to be a little bit unstable at the moment…
“Welcome, . You are signed in with your Facebook account.”
Testing Works Well
lets see how facebook connect goes…
I think it will be great
Testing – With facebook connect
And they launched with bugs. Check your javascript files sent over from Facebook. They are being loaded multiple times. This is coming from Facebook’s end, so until they clear that up it means pages load much slower than they should.
That bug has been fixed.
a 3 horse race, hmm
test
hmm, so where’s the link to the self-service application?
didn’t see it on http://develope...com/connect.php
thx
RTFM
http://wiki.dev...acebook_Connect
I just don’t see Facebook Connect competing with Friend Connect for one simple reason: everybody doesn’t like Facebook.
Google’s solution is available to people who don’t have Facebook or don’t want to use Facebook, while you have to have a Facebook account to use Facebook Connect.
It’s true that “everyone doesn’t like Facebook”, but they have an edge over Google in that their implementation is also a marketing channel, giving sites not only the login feature but a tap into 130 mil Facebook users.
I don’t see Google coming up with that type of positive network effect.
Very true. Posting to FB feeds is a big plus for site owners. It would be cool if they integrated with Twitter. Maybe Google could do that!
Test.
me too
getting ready to install to http://maplegrovechurch.org/
This is quite interesting.
Haha! Let the battle begin! But what happens if Friend Connect and FB connect are both implemented?
It works
I thought social networking is dead. Isn’t it in recession now ?
Cool this is really cool!!!
This is really interesting !!!!! What about OpenID though ??? Isn’t it going to suffer from all this ????
I had a feeling facebook was gonna do this
interested
I have to say we have been waiting for this for a while for our product… can’t wait to give it a spin
It’s amazing how many people are using facebook connect to leave comments here on techcrunch.
Facebook to own our comments? Where will that leave the likes of Disqus, Intense Debate etc. I saw your response to this post on Facebook and came here to reply. I feel that to improve the experience it would be even better being able to reply directly from Facebook or navigate directly to your comment here from the newsfeed!
A developer could easily write an App that allows reading/commenting from within the Facebook interface.
why isn’t your name appearing in green like it usually does?
Facebook is now playing follow the leader behind Myspace and Google. Their $15 Billion valuation is WAY out of line in my mind, especially in these economic times.
I have given Myspace a try (again) and I actually like it a lot more now, nice music services and not nearly as spammy as it used to be.
Wow!! now this is very cool ^^
TEST
Ok, so where is the wordpress plugin for this?
Good idea. But when I tried the Facebook demo link, I got an error message
Interesting
But — as you can see (above) — It works just fine on Tech Crunch!
Cannot wait for the WordPress plugin. Great for “Social sites” — IMHO — like mine: http://www.cyclemania.ca
Will this always have to be a partner feature or will this eventually become something I can copy and paste into my own blog?
Very, very awesome.
Just want to test commenting using facebook connect
CollegeWikis will be implementing facebook live in the next few days. http://www.collegewikis.com
test
my first test comment !
This will be interesting.
Yeah, I saw that. Whether just coincidental or tit-for-tat it seems Google opened up its FriendConenct. SOMEWHAT FRANK just got accepted into the program and I am trying to see what level of effort it would take to try it out. Was wondering how difficult it is to leverage Facebook Connect like TechCrunch has implemented?
Facebook has a wordpress plugin that they’re going to release, but in our experience it takes a few days of tweaking to get just right…and we’re still working on it
Know where we can get a beta or a preview of that?
I knew this will happen eventually. Facebook Is growing faster than Myspace. On my website I have online texting for anyone to use. But this growing like next e-mail.Just click on my name to see.
I’m trying this thing out.
I think it’s an awesome concept.
It is great to see website owners realizing they can both increase registrations and gather rich profile/social data by accepting third party accounts such as Facebook, AOL, Yahoo!, and Google. However, it does not need to be a decision between Facebook and Google or MySpace. Why shouldn’t websites allow users to sign in with any one of their preferred third party accounts? While the undertaking to connect all these services on a website might seem challenging, JanRain recently launched a quick and easy hosted service that does all this for the site. It is called RPX and can be downloaded at http://rpxnow.com.
Love this. An hour after Google Friend goes live, here comes Facebook Connect. This competition is sooo American. If we could only pack up the brainiacs at Google and FB and drop them off (via private jet, of course) in Detroit. Maybe The Big Three might finally ‘get it.’
No kidding- Great idea!
As a website owner, I have no idea why one would consider Google over Facebook in this decision… The promise of FB connect is not about simplifying login, it’s about distribution, something Google isn’t currently offering.
We’re definitely taking a hard look at FB connect for http://www.totspot.com
Exactly.
We are most certainly implementing FBC over GFC for our sports social network (in spanish) http://www.faltauno.com. Obviously for its incredible distribution potential.
Nevertheless, I believe FBC has an important weakness which is unavoidable for it comes from their strength, many people may be reluctant to publicize their FB profiles for some web places, since FB profiles are much more personal than GFC ones.
In a perfect world any given site should have FBC, GFC and hopefuly Linkedin Connect as options.
That’s the problem with the Identity wars. I’d add it to my site (http://www.digitalhit.com) to allow for better voting and sharing but how do I know I shouldn’t be adding Google or MySpace or OpenID’s solution?
Or do I need to add all three/four solutions? Can you do that?
Love the potential. I am on GFC as well and it isn’t nearly as impressive. Why? Well, cause it doesn’t connect to Facebook.
Why doesn’t Google use GFC for youtube?
Wow! that’s a smart idea. They don’t even let you connect your youtube friends to GFC yet…