So Facebook Connect is expanding, as a whole raft of articles and posts reported. The news becomes rather more interesting when put in context. Om uses the Federate or Aggregate? context. Facebook Connect is an attempt to make Facebook the capital of the federation.
Facebook Connect, which was announced in May and is being rolled out this week, allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, then broadcast what you are doing on those sites to everyone on Facebook.
Other federal capital candidates include Google Friend Connect. Taking another approach is the “small army of startups, such as FriendFeed… that want to act as a dashboard for your entire social-web infrastructure.”
Another context for the Facebook Connect ambitions is provided by the story of Facebook’s having to tell some of its users that their email notification settings had been lost. Erick at TechCrunch advises: Don’t put anything on Facebook you’d hate to lose (or reveal to the world, for that matter).
That second context is one of the things making me reluctant to make Facebook the capital of my sprawling social network territory.
Social Media and Linking In to each other (yes, the site, but also any type of Social Networking has huge potential as things go viral. Yet, I agree, that you would never want certain things to go out to “the world” and yet they can if you do not have the ability to control who sees it.
Proceed with caution!