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Can Facebook Build a Better Passport? – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
Posted on: May 10, 2008
It didn’t take long for Facebook to react to the announcement by MySpace Thursday that it would enable other Web sites to tap into information about its users and their friends.
Facebook’s announcement, in a blog post Friday afternoon, is a bit sketchy on the details and has all the appearance of being rushed to match MySpace. Still, what the company calls Facebook Connect offers many of the same capabilities and a few more, too.
As I wrote yesterday, there is a big shift in how the social networks are thinking about how they relate to other sites and developers. In the first round, the social networks invited others to make their sites better — widgets on MySpace pages, applications on Facebook. Now the social networks are becoming even more extroverted: They are offering to use the information they have about users to make other sites better, too.
MySpace, and now Facebook, will let users who have created profiles on their sites — with photos, favorite bands and so on — use that information to fill out profiles on other sites. Since every site seems to encourage users to create a profile to describe themselves, this can help them avoid copying the same information over and over again.
Facebook Connect adds another feature (which I’m sure MySpace will copy): Web sites will be able to let users log in and create accounts with their Facebook names and passwords.
This is similar to what Microsoft tried and failed to build with its Passport system. AOL tried, too, and no one noticed enough to remember that it failed as well. More recently, there has been a movement towards a standard known as OpenID to allow people to log in to one site with an ID issued by another. But so far, it is too complex to use and hasn’t gotten much traction.
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