03 Aug 08
Connecting to Facebook
Without a doubt, the highlight of this year’s famous developer conference f8 was the introduction of Facebook Connect, an API that allows third party websites to connect user accounts to Facebook and add social content to their site. One of the first well known partners to integrate Facebook Connect is Digg, a social community where users may rate news articles. In the German speaking environment Amiando, a platform where users may create events and outsource ticketing procedures. In both cases Facebook’s most important USP, the so called “social graph”, is exported to third party websites, allowing them to add rich user content to their sites. Facebook Connect goes even as far as allowing those third party websites to modify content within Facebook, such as postings at the marketplace. The obvious question then is, why should we bother as a third party website to play around with our user’s Facebook account?
In my opinion there are two key issues that are important, when evaluating whether Facebook Connect may improve a site’s user experience:
1) It is almost mandatory that the look & feel of the connected website resembles somewhat a social community. Large E-Commerce platforms are very unlikely to be affected much by Facebook Connect. As it was already the case with Facebook’s failed application beacon, people simply do not want to be too much involved in each other’s purchasing behavior, as long as it does not touch common interests. Emotional themes that many people share however, such as travel, cultural activities or news, may have stronger potential to be valuable for Connect applications. Most definitely, many companies will be very interested to lower their customer’s purchasing barrier by showing them that their friends already purchased a specific product.
2) The product that is sold should be marketable on Facebook. Although this might sound trivial, I believe that it is very important to know what products are interesting for the Facebook user base and which one’s are simply not. When you look at advertisement on Facebook today, many products are simply not well fit into the general concept on the site. As mentioned in point one, one should be very clear what form of social interaction is offered on the third party website and why integrating Facebook helps to compensate lacks of social interaction.
If you have figured out those two points however, Facebook is able to seriously add much content to your site and helps to make your users feel more at home. Facebook Connect might in the end be one of Facebook’s most important innovations, as it allows for the first time a social community to tear down the walls of isolation and integrate itself anywhere on the web.
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