Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Uma Mahesh Varma — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:29:26 -0000

nice post

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Raj Anand — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:28:24 -0000

I think both have their own advantages. I'm looking forward to Plaxo and Google's fight back to get OpenID more usable. Just blogged about it : http://blog.kwiqq.com/2009/...

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Katie — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:12:57 -0000

I'm really kind of new to facebook but I love the idea of talking to people around the world. I hope I get to talk to alot of people safely. Lets all be safe. Please/ Thank you.

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Paul Houle — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:06:34 -0000

I've been developing a network of sites with community features.

Authentication and login is a huge can of worms. On one hand you're got all the spam and hackers, on the other hand you've got the whole problem of getting people to register. Because I've got a network of sites, I'd like the authentication to work across all of them, but I know that most users would have trouble understanding where the network stops and where it ends.

I've been thinking about facebook connect and about openid. In principle I like the idea about openid, but I don't think that most people care about or understand the idea of a centralized identity to be able to understand how to use openid. Facebook connect, on the other hand, is pretty simple. I mean, you either log in with your facebook account (often you don't need to type in any password) or you register on facebook. If somebody wanted to register on my site and they didn't already have an openid, they'd find choosing an openid provider is about as easy and worthwhile as selecting an alternative electricity provider.

In this case, users will find it empowering to have fewer choices.

So far as data portability and all that blah blah blah I think the only people who care are the people who read Mashable and TechCrunch. The other 99.99% don't even know what it is and don't care.

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

alisa hansen — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:40:26 -0000

RWW has a nice side by side for this: http://tinyurl.com/6advl6

Of course, the real question here is-- open or closed? FBC could potentially create a very AOL-like version of the social Web, a walled garden under the guise of "data portability." I think however, user adoption of this kind of Web experience-- one in which they can have a social context when and where they please, drawing from their single social graph from Facebook (although, don't forget MySpace's Data Availability) for said context. I do think, however, open standards will prevail and we will have decentralized data portability (although, I think FBC is a baby step that has to happen first).

Also, FB has the potential to create business model around FBC (scary or not to users) as noted in this Mash post: http://mashable.com/2008/11...

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Dude — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:51:34 -0000

"Additionally, other key Facebook features, like your friends list, can now be integrated into third-party applications, which can in turn send data back into Facebook and the News Feed."

Oh wow, so then it's just oAuth ( http://oauth.net/ ). Please don't compare this to OpenID, which is something completely different.

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Kevin Whalen — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:14:06 -0000

I would also be interested to see a side by side comparison of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect.

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Damian — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:44:30 -0000

No doubt that services like this solve the big issue with OpenID - that it was generally unusable in its initial form - not from a technical standpoint - but from a UI perspective and a "sales" perspective - no matter how hard I tried to explain the benefits of OpenID to the slightly-more-than-casual internet user - they just didn't seem to care about having a centralized ID.

Re: Facebook Connect is Here; It’s Like OpenID for Dummies

Adam Ostrow — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:29:56 -0000

I think they aren't quite the same ... as we have it on our sidebar, that's basically a cut and paste gadget that Google offers - no "real" coding required. In other words, it's a widget, that happens to use your Google account and contacts to generate some simple stuff like showing which of your friends use Mashable. You can do more complex stuff with it though and use it for your entire authentication system, as Qloud seems to have done. But yea, the big advantage for Facebook is that the data can flow back into the News feed, giving websites both the advantage of no-sign up required and viral marketing. The advantage for OpenID - and it may just be a philosophical one, is that it's not really tied to the solvency of any one company.