04 Aug How Facebook Connect will Change the Internet
It has been a long time coming, and now that Facebook has taken the clear gold medal among social networks, it is high time that the rest of the Internet bows down and recognizes this fact. All hail Facebook, our time sapping and all-friend encompassing overlord. It is with open arms that we welcome thee, as we have no other choice. Not that we would want to. Slowly but surely, there are ways that Facebook is becoming a part of everything else on the social web. And it is all thanks to Facebook Connect. Here are some of the ways I believe that Facebook Connect will be the one ring to bind us all.
In a nutshell, Facebook Connect is a way to utilize your already established Facebook account to authenticate and personalize your activity on third party sites. Makes sense, right? Good, let’s see how it works.
Commenting Made Easy
Scroll down to the bottom of this post for a second, then scroll back up. Ok, so you see that we use Disqus, right? Disqus is a great example of a service that uses Facebook Connect to its advantage. No need to sign up to another site. No need to create another password and username. (Seriously, how many freaking usernames and passwordses do we need?) Disqus uses the information you’ve already given Facebook to log you in, making it easy to leave comments on our blog. (Also, other blogs, too, if you happen to read those.) For those blogs not using Disqus, WordPress has a Facebook Connect plug in that seems to do essentially the same thing: make it easier to voice your opinion.
Also, sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are doing you, and themselves, a big favor by allowing you to sign in with your Facebook ID and immediately share your finds in your feed. On top of commenting, liking and sharing on Digg itself, you can also use the functionality of Facebook Connect to share things with your Facebook friends who aren’t familiar with Digg.
Personalized Advertising
OK, so this is honestly one of my favorite things about FB Connect – the advertising possibilities. What looks and feels like a normal advertisement suddenly becomes very real when you give an ad access to your personal information. It is a way for brands to connect with their audiences not by assuming what their experience will be, but by catering it to them specifically. Films like Demolition Man and Minority Report come to mind when you experience this kind of advertising. The future is here, and we aren’t being advertised to anymore, we are being performed for.
A couple of great examples of advertisers using FB Connect to their advantage are both The Prototype Experience and Discovery Channel’s Frenzied Waters. The Prototype Experience advertises the video game Prototype, and presents users with a video depicting an infected, dystopian future, with humanity the victim of a mysterious plague. Guess whose life is affected by that plague? Yep, YOU. You’ll have to check out the Prototype Experience for yourself if you want to see what I’m talking about. Bottom line, though, it is definitely cool. A similarly clever and personalized ad comes from Discovery Channel to promote their ever-popular Shark Week (as if you needed another reason to watch!). This time Frenzied Waters presents a video which includes your pictures and information as pulled directly from your Facebook account, only now you are the victim of a shark attack. Very clever, very entertaining. View at your own risk.
So How Does This Change Things?
Glad you asked. Things are changing already, and Facebook Connect is just a logical step in capitalizing on the fact that nearly everyone has a Facebook account. I know what you might be thinking, though, is that this is just another way for big companies to access your personal information and exploit it to make a buck. Well you might be right, but hey, if you don’t like it, the door out of the Internet is right behind you.
Honestly, the reason that this kind of connectivity is so important is because it is a win-win-win situation. You win because connecting to third party sites becomes easier, Facebook wins because it is their service and it is another way to infiltrate the lives of its users and “stay with them” longer, so to speak. And the third party sites win because it decreases a user’s barrier to participate, and allows them to immediately share discoveries with their network, thus creating brand ambassadors and aficionados.
To illustrate just what I’m talking about here, you can check out this article on The Business Insider that will let you know just how successful Facebook Connect is. Here are some numbers straight from that article:
- Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
- Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
- Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.
All of this should really be no surprise, but also know that this is just the beginning. Even if Facebook goes the way of MySpace, the idea of being able to connect across sites has often been an elusive and otherwise “janky” experience, but this could be just the model the Internet needs
