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Personalization Advanced integration of Facebook connect allows website managers to
create personalized experiences for site visitors based on Facebook profile data, demo-
graphic information, and geographic location.
For more information on Facebook Connect and some of its other features, visit http://developers
.facebook.com/connect.php.
Tuesday: Understand the Facebook Connect Authentication Opportunity
in the early days of our programming careers, we specialized in a few key areas. As
part of the process of building online communities and internal search engines, we
constantly found ourselves having to build what we termed transparent login systems.
these “duct-taped” solutions provided users with a seamless authentication scheme for
surfing from one secure website to another one that was built, hosted, and maintained
by different teams, organizations, or companies. not only did these schemes address
the multiple login issues that came with integrating multiple secure websites, but they
also solved issues around server state, or persistence.
As a hypothetical example, say you worked at a health-care portal. it feels like
a single site, but in the background there are actually three or four different sites built
and maintained by completely different teams. the back-end systems that run these
websites do not connect and would never be connected. however, you want to build
online communities that require specific personal data from the authenticated user.
these transparent login systems typically consist of a few database tables in a
sQL server database that do nothing more than store user login information from all
the different sites the user was traveling to and from in our little online partner eco-
systems. You could write code that checked to see whether the user in question was
allowed access to the data systems from a partner organization that you needed infor-
mation from, in order to complete the process of building and displaying a web page.
if granted access by the other system, you log them in via the programming code in a
background process as opposed to making them log in manually. this is intended as a
solution for a user experience requirement more than anything else. You couldn’t effec-
tively cast the illusion that a user was surfing on a single website or portal if they were
being required to log in as they traversed different domains.
simply put, authentication is the process of validating that an unknown some-
one from a trusted source is who they say they are. so, this process of having to manage
users’ authentication schemes became more prevalent as companies and organizations
created more complex, interrelated networks of websites. today this issue is not locked
behind the firewall of enterprise intranets. We now have legitimate authentication,
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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