Facebook Connect: Show And Tell For The Web
And that is the distilled brilliance of Facebook Connect: It is the show and tell of the Internet age.
The idea behind Facebook Connect is deceptively simple. Web sites such as Hulu.com, Citysearch, Digg and others that partner with clan Zuckerberg offer Web surfers the ability to log onto their site with existing Facebook information and share interesting tidbits with friends through their news feed.
The content on those partner sites—the videos on Hulu or the stories you vote for on Digg—are the arrowheads, found frogs and shiny rocks of the Web.
Now Facebook is the classroom.
As things are now, most Web sites are like a traditional small classroom. Readers who land on the site add a thought to the string of comments below an article and, generally, that's as far as the social interaction reaches. Facebook's "classroom" has more than 130 million students, enormously expanding the reach of any shared item.
Bear with me as I take the metaphor a little further. When I participated in show and tell I had to prepare. When I brought my pet turtle into the classroom I had to clean her cage, put the turtle in it and then take her to school—all before I could share her with classmates. Facebook Connect is a single sign-on service that rolls all that prep time into one service: See something on the Web, log in with Facebook credentials and share with all of your Facebook friends.
Here's an example. This morning I wrote a review for a pub in Boston in order to test Facebook Connect. I joined Citysearch with my Facebook information and wrote a short review. I posted my thoughts on the menu and was given the option of sharing the review back to Facebook. I did and within a minute or two it appeared in my news feed with a link to the full review. Now my friends can see which pub I recently went to and get my thoughts on the menu.
Facebook becomes the common area that users have to share thoughts, jokes and ideas that are being tossed around on the Web. It goes from being the social interaction—pokes, wall comments and application invites—to facilitating social interaction by providing an open forum that is only limited by the number of partner sites it has.
While the difference may seem to be small, it's a shrewd move on the part of Zuckerberg and Facebook that will ensure increased ad revenue and that the social network never falls out of favor.
Partner sites seem to be excited to join Facebook Connect because it will bring them enhanced visibility and increased page views, resulting in more money. By being part of the Facebook Connect ecosystem, potential new readers can get turned on to new sites by word of mouth, so to speak. One click from Facebook takes a new reader to Hulu, for example, giving its advertisers more exposure. Partner sites generate money and Facebook continues to grow.
Once non-partner sites see how Web traffic grows on partner sites like Citysense they will start adding the application to get a piece of those word-of-mouth referrals that count for so much in any situation. That's why Facebook will be able to avoid an ignoble end like the one Friendster encountered.
Sure, there are other ways of sharing information on the Web. You can e-mail a link, share a news item through Google Reader or tweet about it, to name a few. But each of those interactions is contingent on the number of people following you or friends in your Gmail account.
Facebook isn't exempt from those same restrictions, but as people share more through Facebook Connect and interact with those items, a ripple effect will take place.
Think about it. When a friend comments on someone else's tagged photo in Facebook, that information shows up in your news feed. You can even click on the photo and view it even though you aren't friends with the tagged person. The same thing will happen with content shared from other sites back to Facebook. Friends of friends will start interacting, commenting and taking part in the conversation that now stretches beyond Facebook and across the Web.
That alone doesn't guarantee that Facebook won't ever fall out of fashion, but it does put it in a better position to hang around for a while. Facebook Connect essentially turns partner Web sites into active participants on the social network. If individuals form single strands of thread in the Web, the addition of Web sites will reinforce those strands in steel.