All your info are belong to Facebook (and Google)?
“But what about interesting things that you do on other sites? Maybe you commented on a blog or dugg an article on Digg. Maybe you put up something for auction on eBay, or found a video you love and wanted to share it. Wouldn’t it be nice if when you were on another site, you could easily find your friends on that site and see what they are doing there, just like you can on Facebook?” — Facebook Connect
In what almost seems like a synchronized release, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect have been unveiled today by the largest social network and the largest search engine in the country. At the very least, these two new technologies will be another general Web sign-on protocol, most likely replacing OpenID, which had a lackluster reception at best and will likely effectively disappear with these two giants as competition. From a most pessimistic point of view, these two web giants who, between them, already have a ridiculous amount of information about the average user, has yet another means of data collection.
It does seem like Facebook has learned from Beacon, and has made Facebook Connect an opt-in service rather than an opt-out service, hopefully avoiding the privacy scandals that led Facebook to quickly pull Beacon off the site. Still, I expect to hear stories of people accidentally publishing news about things that they don’t want known, though hopefully not to the same degree as the story about the man who bought an engagement ring on Overstock.com and got it published to his wall.
Perhaps these two tools can fulfill their promise of easy inter-website connectivity without bringing on the anti-privacy apocalypse. I’ll keep my fingers crossed… while installing Facebook Connect onto my website.