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c h a p t e r7:Month 4: AdvAnced tActics And cAMpAign integrAtion■usability, and data portability needs on the open internet. these needs can surface on
business, social, informational, and educational websites alike.
enter the “identity” movement. these are groups of people who started to look
for a standardized way of building open systems to deal with the growing need to man-
age identity, access, and control of computer systems across multiple internet properties
and domains. Although many solutions have been created that take a healthy stab at
solving these problems, none has been standardized. Moreover, the ones that could be
considered “standard” and “open” tend to lack the support and/or features that would
provide programmers and users alike with a compelling reason to adopt one system
over the others en masse.
on May 9, 2008, dave Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook,
announced Facebook connect on the Facebook developers blog (http://developers
.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=108). Facebook connect, although not open, is
Facebook’s answer for a standard authentication service that competes with several
“standard” authentication systems such as oAuth, openid, opensocial, Windows
Live id, and others. More details were made public about the set of Api s on July 23,
2008, at Facebook’s annual conference for developers before the system was made
available to users in december 2008. the service enables Facebook users to log in to
affiliated sites using their Facebook accounts to share information from such sites with
their Facebook friends.
the service, also known as a single sign-on service, enables Facebook users to log
in to non-Facebook sites using their Facebook account credentials. they can then share
information from Facebook with their Facebook friends who use the same non-Facebook
website, blog, or social network. Facebook connect’s identity management system
should not be confused with models based upon “federated identity,” such as openid.
While most people simply associate authentication services with a unified method
of managing their sign-in activity across several websites, Facebook connect does
much more than simply letting users log in to a site by validating their identity via
their Facebook accounts. When logging in with Facebook connect, users bring their
Facebook profile data with them. this means the website or blog they just logged
into can allow them to find their friends who also use the same site. Furthermore, they
can share information and experiences using the same features as they would on a
Facebook application. With Facebook connect, almost every feature that you can
build with an application on Facebook can be offered through a third-party website
or application using the service.Wednesday: Decide How You’ll Use Facebook Connect
so, knowing what you now know about Facebook connect, how do you make the
most of Facebook connect on your website? First, don’t force it. Facebook connect
has a wide variety of features that you can use for your site. some will make sense