Entries tagged as ‘Facebook’
My Facebook account was “temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance” today.
Seems like I’m far from the first person this happened to. It’s common enough to make it into Facebook’s FAQ.
So – no big deal, right? just had to wait a while with uploading photos from today’s trip with the kids, a little annoyance, nothing more. Then I wanted to check in the meantime what’s up on another site. Guess what I used as a login there? yep, Facebook connect. No login for you!
Facebook may be getting away with it for now, as it seems like these “maintenance” downtimes didn’t create negative buzz for Facebook connect’s position as the identity of choice for many avid FB users. But watch as more of these incidents start raising awareness to the implication of relying on Facebook as an identity provider. We’ll then realize it’s another point of failure on our way to our favorite sites, and one with no simple workaround.
Truth be told, this is not a Facebook issue, it’s an issue for centralized identity providers. If WordPress.com were down, my OpenID identity would be down just the same. With unified identity comes a unified point of failure…
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Facebook, Facebook Connect, Identity, OpenID
On Thursday, Facebook outlined some of its platform roadmap plans for developers. One of the items on the long list was called the “Open Graph API“, and with such a name it was sure to raise some interest.
Details were scarce, but the general message coming out of Facebook is that the Open Graph API will allow any site to embed a Facebook page in it, allowing the site owner to set status messages, share links etc., without visiting Facebook itself, and more importantly without sending its visitors to Facebook.
That sounded like a feature aimed primarily at brands, or as Ethan Beard of Facebook presented it: “This will be good for brands like Coke.” Makes perfect sense, as these brands are already using Facebook as part of their social media efforts, but would prefer to have it done on their site rather than on Facebook itself.
Thinking deeper into where Facebook is heading, though, I would think there is a more major endgame to all this. We already know that Facebook wants us to consider it as our online identity. So it allows you to reuse that Facebook identity on other websites and sign in using Facebook Connect. That’s one side of the coin. And then the other side of it is, you have your own website or blog where you may publish thoughts, links and photos that you didn’t publish on Facebook. Facebook would clearly want to bridge that gap as well.
Half a year ago, Facebook adopted the emerging Activity Streams standard for publishing and consuming an individual’s lifestream events to lifestreaming frameworks, a standard promoted by open standards evangelist Chris Messina. So that fits in nicely into the puzzle now: wouldn’t it be nicer if you could publish all this non-Facebook activity into your Facebook’s page, which will now be embedded into your personal website, courtesy of the Open Graph API?
The API then is just the funnel through which your activity stream is published back into Facebook. You get to leverage the social graph you already defined and came to like on Facebook, and Facebook gets tighter integration with your life outside of Facebook, if you still had any. Smart move for Facebook.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Facebook, Identity, Social Graph
Google’s Social Search is doing the walk, all the rest are just doing the talk. As soon as I activated the Social Search experiment, my next search yielded a social result. No setting up, showing how I am connected to that result (including friends of friends), showing as part of the standard web results…
Contrast this with Microsoft’s poor attempt at “social search” by indexing tweets and status messages and showing them regardless of the actual searcher (example search, you’ve got to be on “United States” locale on bing to see it).
Then also contrast it with Facebook’s announcement back in August of its implementation of searching within friends’ posts - a less grandiose announcement that yet delivered far more social experience than Bing’s. Nevertheless, it’s a very limited experience and far from being a true information source for any serious search need.
So how does Google overcome the main obstacle – collecting your connections?
Google relies on its own sources and on open sources it can obtain by crawling the social graph. That is the true reason why Facebook is not part of Google’s graph (no XFN/FOAF marking on Facebook’s public pages). Google may be counting on Facebook’s inevitable opening up, and with Gmail’s rising popularity it becomes a reasonable alternative even for Facebook users like me.
Sadly, all this great news gave zero credit to Delver, where it all happened first…
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Delver, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Social Search, XFN
Exactly 3 months ago Facebook and Microsoft announced live search’s integration in Facebook. The search functionality was up, down, then up again.
Today, it doesn’t seem to be available anymore, the web tab is simply gone.
There doesn’t seem to be any buzz about it so far, is it just a temporary or local glitch?…
Update: OK, note to self – when they say “Now Facebook users in the U.S. have the option to “Search Facebook” or “Search the Web.”“, they probably mean it. Oh well. It is strange, though, that 3 months after integration, Live search is still not rolled out in Facebook’s main growth segment, which is outside the US. Surely not a technical difficulty.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Facebook, Search
‘Tis the season for predictions (and Schadenfreude over last year’s).
One of the most popular predictions for the social web seems to be a diet.
One talks about “Social graph shrinkage“, another about “Social Media Indigestion” (both taken from Peter Kim’s collection of Social Media Predictions 2009), and ReadWriteWeb adds “Friend List Sanitizers” into the whirlwind of diet buzz.
The reason I see sense in this prediction is one – Facebook Connect. So far, we knew what to expect as a result of too many Facebook friends. There was a certain volume of activity stream, and we managed to live with it. With significant adoption of Facebook Connect (which is the main if here), we’ll soon start seeing many external activities being pushed into the stream – comments, locations, recommendations, purchases - and this wave of added content (and clutter) will then result in removal of the noisy and unwanted sources, just like any email marketing campaign brings with it a major bunch of unsubscribes.
I doubt we’ll see any social graph shrinkage any time soon, there are so many new profiles generated every second that this will by far offset any of these filtering (mainly by long time users). But we’ll probably start seeing a major wave of edge removal, which was not at all common so far.
Facebook Connect is definitely an excellent move by Facebook to continue dominating and de-facto owning the social graph, with marketing agencies the first to realize and point out the value beyond single-sign-on convenience. With no open alternative that offers the same value, this trend will only accelerate, unless the new OpenID Foundation board members start moving from enabler technologies into active push of equivalent value proposition.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Facebook, OpenID, Social Graph
