Connect with Facebook

Let’s take a closer look at some activities I did online today. First was my homepage, CNN, where I checked out some local news to begin my web surfing. Next was Facebook—the urge to see what my friends are up to is strong. I also hit up www.sheyna.com, the customized jewelry startup that I worked at this summer, because I received several emails about it from my former boss. I then did some computer science homework and visited Piazzza, the discussion forum, to look at some threads to help me get started. In the process, I got distracted and began to chat online with some friends (who doesn’t?).

In every one of these activities, I logged in, whether automatically or not, through Facebook or Facebook Connect.

What is Facebook Connect? According to Facebook developer Dave Morin, it is a tool that “allows users to ‘connect’ their Facebook identity, friends, and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement…features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook” (http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/108). The definition itself already implies its impacts—Facebook is quickly becoming a human being entrance tool into the world wide web.

It’s already incredibly popular and appealing to the user. “Users prefer to use Facebook Connect by a margin of 2-to-1” (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php
). This statistic means that if a website owner was to implement Facebook Connect into the system, users are twice more likely to log in through Facebook than the native site’s login system itself. Powerful. What makes this widget so popular?

From an application developer’s perspective, Facebook Connect is an incredibly convenient tool that is easy to implement and provides a lot of user data without ever explicitly asking for it. A Facebook user’s account contains a hub of information already so the application developer no longer needs to ask the user for these basics. I interviewed Kyle Horimoto, a member of Facebook’s software development team this past summer, who believes that Facebook’s encapsulation of a user’s online identity represents “the future of the web”. “Ideally, sites should personalize themselves to the user with minimal user effort. Facebook Connect can bring us there by decreasing the work it takes for a user to create a personalized online experience,” Horimoto says.

It’s easy, yes, but what does it mean for society? Specifically, what does it mean to a society that is rapidly moving all its services to the web? A Facebook profile is becoming similar to a driver’s license in terms of being an identity marker. There is enormous power being put in the control of a single online power hours. If this social network, which has become so central to our online experiences, were to ever shut down, charge prices, or make any other similar architectural changes to its structure, the impacts would be enormous as we continue to grow more dependent on this tool’s convenience. Some believe that all social media would completely fall apart (http://blog.futureranking.com/if-facebook-shutdown-what-would-happen-to-the-social-media/
). Additionally, in the future, a hacker would only need to break into a Facebook account to retrieve a password that could be used to steal one’s identity on every site on the net.

However, aside from the potential risks of having a centralized base of information to be attacked, the benefits of an online “account” for everything has the potential to be incredibly useful, as Horimoto suggested. We just need to ask ourselves: are we mentally ready to commit our online entity to a single corporation for these benefits? The conservative may be hesitant, while others don’t mind the spread of this universal login because of its convenience.

Regardless of whether you support the movement or not, Facebook is quickly becoming the core of our online entity. Next time a site asks you to “Connect with Facebook”, know that clicking the button means taking part in society’s move towards a new, personalized internet.