A new Front in the Social Networking War

02/12/08 12:37 PM

Over the weekend Facebook managed to engineer a lot of press noise about the much anticipated ‘Facebook Connect.’ The service, set to be implemented gradually over the coming weeks and months, essentially allows you to sign in to Facebook from another site, Dig, Twitter, etc. Things that users do on these other sites then flow back to Facebook, so votes on Dig for instance, will show up on the Facebook news feed.

Any third party site linked to Facebook in this way is likely to receive a massive bump in hits, as Facebook users are introduced to these new sites. They also store Facebook members’ information which makes signing up a much less arduous process for new users. The real benefit though, lies with Facebook. Connect has the potential to effectively turn the site into the base for most of a person’s internet presence. If this is the case, people are much more likely to keep their profiles running and updated.

The company are far from alone in venturing into this new frontier. MySpace have gotten in on the act too with their planned ‘Data Availability’ system and of course, it wouldn’t be a proper online phenomenon without the word Google being mentioned – they’re planning to launch something called ‘Friend Connect.’

With so many big guns involved, competition for partners is thought to be fierce.

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