Nav

Facebook Connect: The biggest no-brainer in the history of earth

Well; maybe that is a slight exaggeration.  But when I sit back and try to think about some other things that would qualify as some of, say, the top 10 biggest no-brainers in the history of earth, Facebook Connect has got to be among them.

The tagline is one I heard in radio ads on SiriusXM for a mortgage product. I think it is appropriate for describing Facebook Connect.  I am still puzzled as to why some new media companies that come pitch us have not adopted this.  I think they get confused with all the features of their product or service offering to miss one of the biggest distribution opportunities in existence today.  Some others ask me why this is a big deal.  So, let me try an analogy that my mother could relate to.

Imagine you came into some big money from a rich uncle you didn’t know you had and decided to buy an island in the atlantic. Being an ambitious individual, you also decided to start your own country, Softwaristan.  Softwaristan has to have its own passport system and its own currency.  Softwaristan is a beautiful place.  And you want to kickstart its economy by attracting tourists and visitors who might ultimately want to set up shop there.  The problem is, people don’t know about it and don’t really want to apply for a Visa to visit or bother to change their Dollars, Yens, Euros or Cronas into Softwaristans native currency, the Pageview.  Now, the U.N. has a special program. Membership in this program allows a Visa waiver for new visitors from other countries and permits an automatic currency exchange so your country can accept any other currency in the world (the UN helps you convert them into Pageviews).  In addition, the program has another nifty feature.  It has a deal with all of the world’s broadcasters so that tourists in your country can automatically broadcast 30 seconds of daily highlights from their visit to their friends’ TVs during prime time every night.  Oh, and the program is free.  The only condition is you have to sign up to uphold certain conditions in your Passport and Currency program so that they abide with the UN charter.  Do you think you would sign up for this program?  No-brainer!!  Well that U.N. program is basically Facebook Connect.

Facebook is the most successful social network on the planet today.  It has surpassed 400 million users, 50% of whom log into the network at least once a day.  It’s a good bet that it is becoming the place where most people socialize electronically with their friends and therefore, where their social identity exists.  Facebook Connect is a program that allows third party services to integrate with the facebook platform (there are various levels of integration; more info here), such that those services can allow new users to join their service with their Facebook log-in credentials.  That lowers the barrier for new users who might otherwise not spend the time and effort to re-enter all their information (this is the U.N. Visa waiver part of the program).  With the right integration and permissions from the users, these third party services can then post activity updates on the user’s wall on Facebook (this is the prime time broadcast part of the program from above).

In other words, Facebook Connect makes it easy to both get new users and advertise to their friends.  Why would Facebook do this?  Simply, they want to become the standard identification for people’s activities on the internet, thereby permanently claiming mindshare from those users.  A broader initiative on the internet called OpenID seeks to standardize and generalize the hosting of identification information in order to create a “safe, faster, easier way to log in to websites.”  According to a company that is in the log-in facilitation business, an integration with a well-known log-in provider provides user registration lift of more than 30%. Facebook, Google and Yahoo among others are happy to contribute in that effort as providers of log-in credentials but so far are not accepting others’ credentials on their network.  In my opinion, however, Facebook has gained a considerable lead among them because of the number of users and frequency of usage and because of the way they allow integration into the users’ feeds.

As with everything, the devil is in the details.  An effective integration into Facebook feeds has to be implemented in a way that respects the users’ privacy and makes contextual sense (Anyone care that Bobby fed his virtual fish?).   I would recommend that any Facebook Connect integration should at the very least: (a) carefully communicate what information it transfers over from Facebook and how it uses it (in order to transfer some of that built-in trust the user has imparted on facebook);  and (b) creatively think through how the new user’s activities are relevant to that his/her life and social status and only communicate on Facebook in a way that plays to that.