Twitter has just released a new Facebook Connect type feature, allowing developers to use Twitter’s OAuth technology to let their users to sign in with Twitter. The website can then use your Twitter account to let you tweet, utilize your friend lists, followers, small bio, among other information.
I personally don’t believe Twitter presents a threat to Facebook Connect, for many reasons, at least not right now. Facebook has a lot more information about its users, and it has the capacity to send information to the FB news feed. Even though information can be pushed to Twitter, it quickly gets lost with the high volume of tweets from all the users everyone follows. The difference here with Facebook is, people don’t have thousands of followers and actually care about what their friends are doing and actively monitor their feed.
In other Twitter news, Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@ev) and actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) both appeared on the Oprah (@oprah) show the other day, celebrating Ashton’s one millionth follower (see Ashton celebrating when he reached one million followers).
Microsoft, along with other web companies that have traditionally enjoyed dominance in the instant messaging space but are now feeling increased pressure from Facebook given the growing adoption of Facebook Connect/Facebook Chat.
Microsoft today introduced a new feature allowing you to add Windows Live Messenger to your website. The problem is that it seems too difficult for the average person to implement on their site, and seems to be subject to approval by Microsoft (see #3) Microsoft should work on making it easier for people to implement on their site with a simple JavaScript code or something like that.
You will now have the option of sending messages you create from TweetDeck to your Facebook status. Additionally, you will be able to login to Facebook chat from TweetDeck to chat with friends that are online indicated with a green status indicator dot. There are already a number of IM applications that let you use Facebook chat simultaneously with other IM platforms such as Digsby (Windows) and Adium (Mac).
Currently, TweetDeck accounts for about 16% of all tweets, followed by twhirl with 6.85% market share. 32% of all tweets are generated from Twitter itself. Read the full story
Facebook has just introduced its first widget, the Facebook Comment box for Facebook Connect. Now, you can easily add the Facebook Comment system to your own site which offers a great opportunity for you to tap into the Facebook community as users have the option to make their comments appear in their news feed, potentially reaching thousands of people.
There are a number of other services online that offer advanced commenting such as Disqus and IntenseDebate (recently acquired by Automattic (the company the owns Wordpress)). I’ve recently contacted IntenseDebate and they’ve told me there are no current plans to support Facebook Connect. They do currently support OpenID, but I do think the opportunity to tap into the Facebook community is a significant advantage, enough so to ditch all the other services…if you consider the other services such as IntenseDebate, all you are really getting is gravatars, reply to comments, and the comments karma feature which no one really uses anyway.
Now, if you would like to easily get Facebook Connect set up on your WordPress blog, you can easily do it with these simple steps. Read the full story
Meebo will now re-support Facebook Chat as the company has implemented it with Facebook Connect as requested by Facebook. Meebo is the biggest supporter now of Facebook Connect in terms of number of users. There are also other popular multi-protocol applications you can download and use that support Windows Live Messenger, GMail, SameTime, and Facebook Chat. The best are Adium for Mac users and Disby for Windows users.
Twitter has now added support for Google Friend Connect. Notably, Twitter will not adopt Facebook Connect. Google says “this integration with Twitter is an example of how we want to continue improving Friend Connect, extending the open social web and bringing social features to more places on the web.”
Facebook Connect is now open. Facebook Connect is essentially a registration system that allows just about any website to let its user login with their existing Facebook login. People who login will be able to share information and actions on your site and network with your different visitors. There is a lot of potential which is why companies should jump at this opportunity. Adopting Facebook Connect will surely increase activity on your site, and certain events can be relayed back to the users news feed, which could help virally push your site to thousands of people. With Facebook’s 130 million active registered users, Facebook Connect is surely poised to takeover OpenID and all other competitors. I can really see many companies adopting Facebook Connect in the coming months simply because of the large user base and potential for viral marketing.
Facebook has just introduced its first widget, the Facebook Comment box
