Monday, December 08, 2008

Facebook 'Connect' Zaps Site Registration Hassles

  Facebook is getting ready to take another stab at introducing a Beacon-like feature that allows your Facebook friends track your Web-whereabouts with a service called Connect. The service is set to launch within a few weeks, according to Facebook.

The Facebook Connect feature will allow participating Connect site owners to share user names and logins. This allows end user to sign into Facebook, for example, and surf over to another participating Connect site and avoid having to create an additional user name and password for access to that site.
Another aspect of the Connect feature will update your Facebook Newsfeed with news as to what participating Connect websites you've visited. For example, if you "dugg" an article on Digg your Facebook Newsfeed would report this.
This is not the first time Facebook has tried to federate user information across the Web. Last year, Facebook's 'Beacon' advertising program backfired at the company, as the program failed to properly warn users that their activity on partner websites was shared on Facebook.

However, this time, Facebook seems to have learned from its previous experience and 'Connect' users will be able to adjust their privacy settings for which actions will be shared on the social network. Besides that, Facebook promises it will be "carefully authorizing" each partner in the 'Connect' program. The new feature will compete with similar offerings from rival social network MySpace and with Google's 'Friend Connect.'

Facebook 'Connect' works in a remote way like 'OpenID.' Basically, using this feature you will be able to access various websites without having to create a new profile and tediously enter all your personal data. This article is adapted from PCWorld. More posts about Facebook from Ekendra's blog click here.

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