Posts tagged FriendFeed

Facebook is working hard to embed itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. So imagine if as an outside developer or website administrator you could hook into Facebook users’ data and activities directly, and persistently, for far longer than the previous limit of 24 hours? How would this change your online business model?

Organizing the world’s information in this way is an obvious affront to Google. And where Google observes links and relationships between websites from a distance, Facebook is now aiming to become the glue that connects the web itself.

The implications are thrilling, but also frightening – what if Facebook goes down?

The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already quite strong. Facebook’s director of products, Bret Taylor, recently explained just how strong when sharing his own struggle to grow FriendFeed – a real-time social networking company that was eventually acquired by Facebook. Users who signed up for FriendFeed via Facebook Connect were up to four times more likely to become active users than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.

But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode user engagement and relationships. They can utilize Facebook’s many social plugins to uncover personalized friend activity and recommendations. And Facebook will establish persistent, dynamic links to users’ participation on connected sites around the web through its introduction of “like” buttons.

Users will now have the ability to share their interests not only by saying what they like — say, a local coffee house — but by saying what web site actually represents it — maybe a Yelp review page, instead of the establishment’s official site. Web services would be foolish not to participate.

And as a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but in the end quite useful. As a Facebook engineer recently put it, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be incredible!”

Facebook.me would allow users to use Facebook as a CMS. Let’s say you’re one of those crazy MySpace holdouts who wants blinking disco lights on your profile. Fine. Make a web page, host it at whatever URL you choose, make it as hideous as you wish, and port in data that dynamically connects to Facebook. It’s not hard to imagine that many brands and small businesses might simply use this in lieu of a traditional webpage.

Another recent demo, KlugePress, gives the ability to use a customizable template and then port in Facebook event information. Only users who have been invited to the event on Facebook would be able to load a KlugePress invite. If users are logged in to Facebook and have access, they can RSVP, comment and see details just as they would on a bland Facebook event page. The data itself is carried right back to Facebook.

By inviting its developers to integrate with it so tightly, Facebook is enabling many new opportunities, but at the same time requesting an awful lot of trust, too.