I am mighty impressed with Facebook Connect. It offers a tremendous potential for businesses and individuals to improve their visibility on the web. Of course, both Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook Connect came out of their test phases at the same time, but at the moment Facebook Connect seems to be holding the sway, largely because of its impressive 120 million user base. MySpace too has a fairly large user base which matches Facebook, but the growing popularity of Facebook, coupled with a cluttery feel and template heavy profile pages makes MySpace a bit messed up in terms of aesthetics. With Facebook hungrily adding new features by the day, the longer term prospects of Facebook look much more attractive than that of MySpace unless it does something drastic to counter this.
MySpace certainly is not idle. It has constantly sought to improve it’s platform, and now with all the internet majors looking at data portability as an option, it comes as no surprise that it has tied up with Google for friend connect, along with the existing partnerships with Yahoo, eBay, Twitter & PhotoBucket. However, what MySpace really needs to do is to keep it simple and appealing to users. It really has to move away from its cluttery offering.
Google’s Friend Connect offers similar data portability as Facebook Connect, but again lacks in appeal and a popular social networking platform. Google has really failed in coming up with something as smart as either a Facebook or a Twitter. It’s very own Social Networking Platform, Orkut, has failed to catch-up with sufficient audiences and is limited to users largely from Brazil and India, failing in the first hurdle itself.
Facebook Connect, on the other hand, seamlessly integrates with a site or a blog with a one click login and allows users to interact with the site, which gets fed into the Facebook News Feed on the user’s Facebook Profile Page, making it visible to the user’s close community. This helps in increasing the brand and product awareness among Facebook users. Social influence in marketing is the key to succeed and Facebook offers this social influence in a surprisingly simple way to a very large user base at absolutely no cost. I am certain that in the coming months it will be a standard feature with many popular commercial/non-commercial online models as well as personal websites and blogs adapting to Facebook connect!
There is an early release of a Wordpress Plugin for Facebook Connect developed by Six Jumps and I have been experimenting on this to get it live on my blog and should hopefully done on the weekend. It is incredibly simple to set up, with a little help from extensive tutorials by Six Jumps and I highly recommend getting this working soon on your blog. You will instantly have an army of friends marketing your blog to a wider audience.
