Facebook Connect

Sholom Sandalow, Thursday, August 6, 2009 @ 4:40 pm

I've just come across Yahoo's new home page, which features a clean streamlined look, the ability to add your favorite pages as links right on the homepage, and most interestingly, a module that gives you access to (a subset of) your Facebook account. This module, which appears when you hover your mouse over the Facebook link on the let hand side of the page, will--after sign in--open up your facebook friend feed right there on the Yahoo home page.
Apparently Facebook has been giving third party websites the ability to connect to their users via Facebook for 8 months now (through a set of API's collectively called Facebook Connect). But the Yahoo home page is the most high profile example yet. This is certainly the first time I've come across it.

The benefits of Facebook connect Facebook is obvious. It'll gather more information about its users, and become more ubiquitous within the wider web, as users remain connected to its platform even while not actually on the facebook.com.

And the (potential) advantage of the relationship to third party sites, such as Yahoo are that those sites can become more engaged with their users by providing them with more relevant content as a result of having access to their facebook information. It'll also potentially be used as a tool for enhanced direct marketing, although Facebook will have to be careful to to repeat it's Beacon mistake.

The potential benefits to users of third party sites are that they'll be able to tap into their network (or social graph, as Facebook calls it) as a source of information on those third party sites, and not just facebook.com. As a hypothetical example, if I'm looking for a movie to add to my Netflix queue, and I, and my friends were sharing our facebook information with Netflix, then the site could theoretically inform me of my friends picks--provided they granted Netflix access to share that information--and that would be more helpful to me than anonymous recommendations.

I like the idea, in theory, and it's seems like an exciting new direction in the evolution of the way we use the web, if implemented properly. However there are some privacy concerns I have. In order to allow Yahoo to access my Facebook account, I had to give it the Ok on a couple of different requests relating to access to my information. The initial confirmation dialog:
Connect Yahoo! with Facebook to interact with your friends on this site and to share on Facebook through your Wall and friends' News Feeds. This site will also be able to automatically post recent activity back to Facebook.

Related Services: User Experience Design, <Facebook and Open Social Applications

Another dialog asked me to confirm this:
Allow Yahoo! to publish posts or comments without prompting me.
Posts will appear on your Wall, in your friends' News Feeds and in applications like Photos, Videos and Notes.

Now what exactly is Yahoo going to be posting on my Facebook wall? I don't want all my activity, once I am logged into the Yahoo network, to be potential fodder for conversation among my friends. This to me seems a little scary. Yet I went ahead and gave it access. I do know that it's possible to edit my privacy settings as it related to individual third party applications, including Yahoo. But I'm curious what kinds of Facebook wall posts Yahoo will make on my behalf so I haven't changed the settings.

Related posts:

1. Facebook apps: Not too late to compete on the user experience front
2. Mashups versus Facebook
3. 20 useful Facebook/FBJS developer resources
4. Facebook Application Logistics for Team Development
5. Ideal team size for your next Facebook project

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