Facebook connect is live, and what next?
Posted by Diego on December 10, 2008
What would happen if you could authenticate via Facebook in your favourite site? This is one of the benefits that Facebook connect will bring you, now that it is live as an earlybird application of Social graphs.
Social graphs are the online representation of:
- Our online identity (or identities, some people have reasons to have more than one ).
- Our personal relationships (basically family, friends, coworkers…) that can be waaaaaay more refined, look at the picture below.
- Our business relationships (with Brands, clients, providers…).
- Our relationships identity, that in my opinion is why are we connected with the people in each one of our networks.
Image via readwriteweb
Portable Social graphs are the same, but just on our iPhone (or similar device we carry on along with keys and wallet ).
If you want the background, take a look at Jeremiah’s explanation about Social graphs or a another great explanation by Alex Iskold .
How Facebook connect will change the social environment? That is the question in the air now since we heard that Facebook Connect is now live . We know too that the guys from Razorfish see its potential .
You can now help and be helped by friends in your buying decisions.
This is the sample application for Facebook connect.
And for the Brands? Theres is an opportunity for them to monetize social graphs as long as third parties that play will allow their users to:
- Authenticate via Facebook (at the moment just for certain non-secure transactions).
- Find easily friends that have reviewed the item you’re about to buy.
- Reccomend a product to selected friends.
As you see, this translates in more strength in networks than in the individuals, as the Cluetrain manifesto predicted in 1999 . Has to do too with the interesting ideas of Niklas Luhmann as he regarded society not as a network of individuals, but rather as the totality of all communications.
