I’ve been playing around with Facebook connect on some of 
my social media tools. On Plurk (which you can find me here), trying to install it onto this blog but I’m hopeless at HTML coding, social bookmarking sites and on other social networking sites as well. I haven’t even begun with the mobile apps yet…
Rumor has it that Facebook connect is coming to Twitter as well. (You can find me here on Twitter)
So how does this make 2009 Facebook’s year?
Firstly, Micro-blogging is hot and Twitter is the most popular micro blogging site in the world right now. With a means to connect via Twitter, Facebook will definitely gain more share in the social networking site as various communities around Twitter begin to engage on Facebook. With a firm social networking site growing, where does this leave Google’s Friend connect then?
Second, as more blogs begin to accept Facebook connect, the various communities within their individual niches will begin to gather and use Facebook to interact with each other more.
Third, various social networking sites which were made with the intention to gather more people from Facebook to their niches might find it backfiring. Since the masses will begin to be on Facebook, why not just set up a fan page or a community page on Facebook.
Fourthly, Facebook connect is a lot easier to integrate as compared top Open ID. The social networking site is an ideal place, with the masses, which can easily facilitate the interaction needed. Open ID was a novel idea to integrate all our favorite social tools, but it didn’t provide a platform for us to intergrate with people who had similar interests.
Fifthly, social bookmarking sites work on tags. If people with similar tags have a shared interest then Facebook as a social networking site provides the ideal platform for you to start a community to further interact with people who share similar interest with you.
Lastly, Facebook could potentially takeover site which have provided the service of aggregating everything together on their site. Sites such as Friendfeed might soon find themselves redundant.
As Facebook begins to integrate further into our online lives, their market share will inevitably grow. Of course, there’re privacy issues to be dealt with but that’s another topic of discussion.
Is Facebook going to be the main platform whereby users would come to check all notifications from their various social tools? Or would users rather have the privacy whereby not all things are meant to be shared? Open ID had the purpose of attempting to integrate everything onto one ID.
How are marketers and PR practitioners going to utilize this increased integration? Will spam hit us again? (After all, spam once and you spam several social tools, value for money and great to tackle those cut budgets!) Or can campaigns finally have the opportunity to have an awesome use of various social tools?
Or will this backfire in a campaign? After all, different social tools are used to achieve different objectives in campaigns.
Share your thoughts and views!
Great post. Anyone who uses multiple social media sites will realize that aggregation and simplification is required. I love the idea of using Facebook as a hub, then using more specialist sites and tools as “bolt ons” to Facebook. Google may be too late to the game: building a profile there isn’t intuitive. FriendFeed performs the aggregation role, but not much more.
@David: Glad you like it. It’ll be interesting to see how Facebook plays it out when people start to aggregate all their content onto their Facebook profile.
Facebook will remain popular for a while, but I don’t know if it’ll last forever. The way it’s set up, Facebook is bound to get bloated after a while. The site can only absorb so much data before it gets too huge to efficiently manage the entire net; and by that time the teen world will consider the site old hat, like is happening to MySpace.