Bolocks!! I shouted! ...If you've watched that video showing how to add Facebook Connect commenting, you will have heard, but may have missed them saying, quote:
.. "Here's to making the web more open and social"
Marketing talk always gets my goat, and the intentional splicing of the words "open" and "social" together, where it really doesn't apply, does nothing to soften my distrust of Facebook.
Doesn't anybody see that Facebook Connect isn't about "making the web more open and social".
What it IS about, is making Facebook more important to it's users.
Facebook Connect is about a relationship between Facebook and the site using Connect. They allow your data to travel backwards and forwards between Facebook and the site.That is two endpoints along a line. One being the site with Facebook connect, the other being Facebook.
Remember what the campfire catchphrase was at open socials conception?
..."Make the whole web social."
I've tried tio illustrate the differences.
It's actually weighed very much in Facebooks favour: the "whole web" looks nothing like that. If anyone has some facts about size it would be interesting to mash them into one of those "if this melon was the sun..." kind of models.
Of course Friend Connects penitration is still tiny. The big sites are too stupid to see the long tail, and like throwing money away doing things twice: if nothing it helps keep IT people in work.
