FaceBook Connect

Facebook Connect – The Untold Story

With FaceBook Connect you could potentially have 15 million users in 2015 with automatic secure login and the system would tell your friends what you are doing and where you are going. That is too much for any website doing e-commerce on the web to ignore.

Around 80% of the FaceBook’s revenue is dependent on advertising. While competitors like LinkedIn Corp. and Google Inc. have taken steps to limit their social networks’ dependence on third-party ads FaceBook seems to take a different stance. What if we told you there is another way for this social network FaceBook to make millions, even billions of dollars and what if this technology had been in use since 2008.

Facebook Connect is the program that lets users sign into their favorite third-party websites with their Facebook login, and is on every domain name under the sun. Released four years ago to relatively little fanfare, Facebook Connect is the parent of the company’s API and platform programs, which were introduced in 2006.

FaceBook Connect- allows you to take your identity and friends around the Web while being able to trust that your information is always up-to-date and always protected by their privacy settings. A convenience for web surfers, Facebook Connect is also good to websites that integrate the platform into their login systems. Since making it a requirement for users to login to its system through Facebook last September, Spotify has added roughly 5 million users – a total representative of 25% of its user base. Other third-party sites implement a less extensive version of Connect, though its biggest benefit is that it is free. In its first year of operation, Facebook reported that roughly 80,000 sites had integrated with the service; this total had grown to 2 million by the end of 2010.

In 20-plus months, FaceBook has added 10,000 sites a day syncing to their login systems with Connect. This means that Facebook Connect must have upward of 7 million partner sites currently, with this total expected to reach 11 million by the end of next year.

Though there are no perfect comparisons for Facebook Connect, we can make a few indirect conclusions about the potential of the service. Google’s social network, Google+, allows users to remain logged into its bevy of sites, ranging from Gmail to YouTube, though this integrated functionality only exists under the company’s banner. Likewise, Microsoft’s new social network “So.cl” allows its users to integrate their Bing search history into its platform, but offers little else at the moment.

It is important to keep in mind that most sites are now developing their platforms to seamlessly integrate with Connect, making login quick, smooth, and easy for users. If the social media company did choose to slap a price tag of, let’s say $19.99 a month on the service, third-party sites would have little choice but to comply. Any site bold enough to resist this charge would risk losing the fraction of their user base that was signed up exclusively through Connect. In today’s rough-and-tumble e-marketplace, we’re willing to bet that this is a setback that no site, large or small, could afford.

I do not know how FaceBook will move forward with connect but it is clear that website owners must consider using FaceBook connect. With FaceBook Connect you could potentially have 15 million users in 2015 with automatic login and the system would tell your friends what you are doing and where you are going. That is too much for any website doing e-commerce on the web to ignore.