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Adoption

Facebook Connect is very well suited to blogging platforms and commenting networks due to their limited user management features. In these cases, a user's interaction within that website is primarily limited to commenting on a resource, and perhaps receiving emails when someone follows up on what they've posted.

Some of the earliest adopters of the Facebook Connect service included Digg, Six Apart and CitySearch. Their implementations of Facebook Connect focused around allowing a user who was not logged into their service to comment on a resource by clicking on a Facebook Connect button, which would then prompt them to acknowledge that they are connecting to the third party service through their Facebook account. They would then be logged into the third party service transparently, and the third party service would behave as if the user had logged in conventionally.

Facebook Connect has now reached a large scale adoption rate by many networks due largely to the market that it allows a network to tap into. With Facebook approaching the 200 million users mark, integrating Facebook Connect to your community gave visitors an incentive to login, as it would require less work for them. Their name, profile picture, and friends could be pulled in, without any further intervention from the user, or the community.

Theory

Facebook Connect has received a great deal of publicity over the past few months, as it's allowed publishers and networks to tap into the Facebook platform and it's large user base free from the Facebook branding and image. Facebook's single sign-on solution, however, is one of a larger movements towards an open social medium whereby people can connect to disparate networks through unified methods.

It's biggest competitors include OpenID, MySpaceID, and Google Friend Connect. Each of these, some through different approaches, aim to provide a unique, streamlined method for logging into external networks through external credentials. For example, with Google Friend Connect, a user would be able to sign into your blog and post comments with their Google account even if you were using a proprietary registration system.

Therefore, the theory behind Facebook Connect is nothing new. OpenID led the movement in 2005 through their publication of the OpenID authentication protocol. The problem with this, however, was it's relatively slow adoption. Using a single OpenID account and connecting to all your different online networks required a culture that valued not owning registration data. OpenID came with an idea but had little to no user base to help push and promote the idea. Facebook on the other hand came to the realization of a single sign-on system after having amassed hundreds of millions of users.

Although the theory behind Facebook Connect has been around for sometime now, it's direction does differ significantly due to their unique position within the market. Facebook has arguably one of the strongest user bases available on the internet with each user's priorities within that network revolving around their real life, human connections. These friends are what add substance to an online presence or entity and because of this, Facebook's ability to connect users on third party sites not only with a streamlined registration/login process but also with their real life friends, is something that many of it's competitors with arguably the exception of MySpaceID, could in no way compete with.

There has been a significant amount of opposition to Facebook's implementation of a single sign-on solution, however. Most notable of the complaints is that Facebook Connect is not built on open standards. OpenID, Google Friend Connect, and MySpaceID are all built on an open standard that in an ideal environment would be mutually compatible. Facebook's implementation, however, remains owned and operated entirely at their discretion.

Application

The impact of integrating Facebook Connect into your community can be difficult to gauge. The reason this is the case is due to the chicken-and-the-egg conundrum.

A community's success is not driven solely by unique content. One of the largest factors that determines a community's growth and strength comes from the reinforcement of interaction by the governing business. For example, you create a blog post and one hour later receive a comment. Then, for 6 months nothing happens until another visitor discovers the post and adds a follow up comment to the initial one. On a blog one of the highest priorities to foster a community is to encourage engagement, so in an ideal situation, the initial commenter from 6 months earlier should somehow be alerted to the new comment and be given a gateway to follow up.

If you own the blog and own the regristation/login process this type of interaction reinforcement is fairly straightforward to handle. You would simply send an email to the initial commenter alerting them of the new comment. With Facebook Connect it isn't that simple.

Facebook Connect allows for the seamless registration and login process at the cost of having less information about your users. This information is all controlled by Facebook and kept private. So for example, if the follow up commenter had signed in through Facebook Connect you would not be able to send a follow up email because Facebook does not allow you to access the Facebook connected user's email address.

This is where the initial chicken-and-the-egg riddle comes to fruition. If that follow up commenter had only posted due to the ease of logging in through Facebook Connect, then it is difficult to gauge Facebook Connect's impact. In order to grow a strong community interaction reinforceent is a key requirement. If you can't reinforce users due to the method they signed up with then you face a problem. Which comes first when growing a strong and successful community: streamlining registration for less barriers to entry, or a strong push towards interaction reinforcement? With Facebook Connect it is currently not possible to promote both and it could therefore be argued that for one, you need the other.

There will soon be ways to circumvent this hurdle. Facebook is currently working on an emailing proxy system that would allow you to in fact send emails and have them be forwarded by Facebook on your behalf. While this solution would help it would still leave your organization in a place where by they do not own the registration information and therefore cannot use it for whichever purpose their system requires.

All of this criticism aside, Facebook Connect will give your community an extra boost of membership and interaction at the cost of slightly less flexibility. Additionally, it should be noted that as Facebook Connect matures we believe many of these issues will be resolved by having Facebook extend their platform to support 95% of the requirements the average community has.