Facebook flipped the switch on its single sign-on technology Thursday. Facebook Connect can now be implemented by any site on the internet on a self-service basis through the company’s platform for web developers.
The company says over 100 websites have added Facebook Connect during the testing period or will release it within the coming weeks. Several high-profile websites are on the list, including Digg, CNET, Gawker, Vimeo and several universities.
The system is a proprietary creation of Facebook, and it presents a challenge to the open source technology known as OpenID.
Facebook Connect lets Facebook’s 125 million users participate on other websites using their Facebook IDs. Along with an easy login, the user gets the option of re-broadcasting whatever they do on the third-party site to all of their friends within Facebook. The user can also match existing friend relationships on Facebook with those on the third-party site.
For example, users who wants to vote on or leave a comment on a Digg story will be able to log in to Digg.com using their Facebook ID and password. They can participate on Digg just like a registered Digg user, voting, commenting and adding friends. As they click around on Digg, the fact that they dugg such-and-such story, or wrote a comment, will show up in their Facebook news feed in the same way it would if they had written on the Wall of one of their Facebook friends. The company promises there will be privacy controls, so only information approved by users gets re-broadcasted to their Facebook friends.
The main drawback to Facebook Connect is that the social data gathered in these transactions all gets fed back into Facebook. By implementing Facebook Connect, a site owner is agreeing to share any data it collects about users who log in using the system with Facebook — and Facebook alone.
Users get the benefit of carrying all that Facebook friend data with them, but they can’t use it anywhere else. If they want to broadcast their activities on Digg through some other means, like a Blogger blog, they’re on their own.
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