Socialmedialand

I haven’t been this excited since…well I don’t know. I guess I tend to get excited a lot. I’m a nerd what can I say. Anyways, the point is that I’m super excited about Facebook Connect and you should be too.

The easiest way to think about is that it’s like a passport for your social world where various social sites are the countries you’re trying to visit. Before if you wanted to visit StumbleUpon, you had to apply for “citizenship” or get a specific login on that site. Then you have all the paperwork – you have to create a profile, upload a picture, find your friends, etc. And, ok, you do that at StumbleUpon because it’s a really important site to you, you see the benefits and you want to belong there. But as time goes on, you visit so many new “nations” or networks, and you have so many different profiles and identities that you can barely keep them straight or remember if you have a login when you come back a few months later.

For us social media lovers, this is acceptable. This is the price of admission. Some of us (or maybe just me?) create worksheets to track all the logins. I even sort mine by major sites vs. the small ones I sign up for in case they make it big in a few months. But for the average user – if you see a site you want to participate on but you’re not sure you’d ever want to come back (maybe you just want to leave one stupid comment! come on!) you might just skip it and not participate at all.

Facebook connect changes this. Sure there are others that have come before, OpenID for example. Or the browser based solution, Flock, that my coworker Andrew F wrote about. And there are many others competing to be the one, but the large acceptance of Facebook leads me to believe that it has a good chance of winning this war. Google might have a shot too – but let’s talk about Facebook because that’s the title of this post.

So you go to Facebook and you make your passport. You take a photo, fill in your information. You’re now a citizen of Facebook and you make connections there, build your home and everything is great. But now you want to travel. So you head over to Citysearch (for example) because you searched for the restaurant you want to try and that site came up in results. The next day you want to go back and write a review because you had a great time. But they want you to login. No problem, get out your Facebook passport by clicking “Sign in Using Facebook” and you’re in. Not only are you in, but your passport will get stamped giving you a record of your visit. In other words, what you do on the Citysearch site will communicate back to Facebook and you’ll get a message the next time you login asking if you would like to publish the story about the comment you left on Citysearch.

And it all comes full circle. Now you have ONE identity. You have ONE place where you can publish the things you do around the social globe. I love it for its simplicity. It makes me want to go out and delete all my accounts and resign in using Facebook instead. I won’t yet. Because the system’s not ready for that – there’s still a limited list of sites that use Facebook connect. But I have high hopes for this in the future.

Think of the implications. For users, it opens everything up. Nothing will be off limits and you can keep your info and network in tact as you travel around the web. For marketers – it means reaching your audience in new places. It increases the need to monitor your brand across all available channels and actively interact across all the networks. But you can make a Facebook account too – so it should be just as easy for you to travel.

And this is perfectly in line with the future of social. Social has to get easier, not more complicated. The expert predictions for 2009 all centered around the idea of simplicity: culling your friend lists to remove any unknowns or annoyances, cleaning up the news feed and tying your activities together through apps and widgets. One step further, Facebook connect centers your true online identity – just like a passport represents your true identity in the real world.

If analogies aren’t for you and you’d like a little more detailed explanation with some visuals – check out this slide show from VizEdu:

The next step is watching to see which major player wins out and becomes THE place to maintain your passport or identity – Facebook, Google, Myspace, AOL, Yahoo!, OpenID, Others(?). One of them will become the widely accepted standard and the others will eventually have to concede and allow us to sign on using our standard ‘passport.’ It’s like the HD DVD v. BlueRay thing all over again (or VHS v. Betamax if you remember that). Thoughts? Agree? Disagree?

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