The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Dick Hardt, and Steve Gillmor — got all LinkedIn in the wake of the startup’s successful IPO. Amid the fear mongering about another tech bubble, it seemed more likely that LinkedIn was the first of at least a trio of big social plays going public. Facebook and Twitter seem no brainers, each with their own dynamics in terms of revenue plus… → Read More
Here at Le Web in Paris, Facebook head of platform Ethan Beard told our very own Mike Arrington that 250 million people are now connecting via the Facebook Connect ecosystem. Facebook Connect was implemented in 2008 in order to allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity to any site online currently → Read More
Yesterday, Apple launched iTunes Ping, their new music social network. Part of that launch was a very basic implementation of Facebook Connect, simply to hook in and find out which of your Facebook friends were also using Ping. I tried it yesterday and it worked fine. But this morning the option vanished and everyone was left wondering what happened?
Well, it vanished because Facebook started… → Read More
Facebook Connect launched in late 2008. And now, a year and a half later, some 250,000 sites around the web are using it. Meanwhile, Facebook’s new social plugins (the kind using the new Open Graph) have been out for three weeks. Already, those are on over 100,000 sites Facebook confirmed today.
That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. At this rate, it will take just a couple months for… → Read More
Every place and object in the world has a secret past: who lived there, who passed by, who touched it. The secret lives of objects are filled with such details. If only you could make them talk. But what if you could give any physical object a story simply by sticking a barcode on it and appending a message to that barcode? The message could be a photo, a text message, a video, or a voice note. → Read More
Facebook’s Director Development Network Ethan Beard took the stage at the Le Web conference in Paris to talk about the status of Facebook Connect.
Beard’s talk focused on the notion of identity as defined by connections – to people, things, places, etc. “We aspire to be a technology that people use to connect to things they care about no matter where they are,” he says.
More than 80,000… → Read More
This is all kinds of awesome. For its upcoming 10th anniversary edition of David Fincher’s film Fight Club, Fox has created a website that uses Facebook Connect in one of the best ways I’ve ever seen. Once the site loads up (it takes a little while since it’s Flash-based), you simply hit a button to Connect and you’re off. The result is a mash-up of scenes from the film along with random pictures… → Read More
For the past several weeks, we’ve been making improvements to CrunchBase to build a more engaging product for the people that drive it – which is to say, “everybody”. Since it was launched, Crunchbase has always been a freely editable repository of information about technology companies. Since February 2008, we’ve received over 100,000 edits from anonymous users in addition to the copious amounts… → Read More
NBC is gearing up for the 2010 Winter Olympics with some changes to its mainstay site, NBCOlympics.com, scheduled to go live tomorrow. (See screenshots below). Once again, just as it did with the 2008 Summer Olympics, NBC will be using a video player based on Microsoft Silverlight technology to offer full HD videos. Except this time, the video player will have DVR-like functionality, with the… → Read More
Facebook has long relied on its own users to help translate the site into more than 65 different languages. Now, Facebook wants to unleash its army of volunteer translators on other sites and apps across the Web. Any site or app that use Facebook Connect can now tap into the Facebook community to get help translating their site into any language that Facebook Translations supports.
As Facebook… → Read More
Facebook’s quest to become the social operating system of the Web is driven by how many how many other Websites and apps tap into the social network through Facebook Connect. The mobile Web is a big target for Facebook. Back in March, it made Facebook Connect available to iPhone apps, since those are the most fully featured and popular. Today, it took another step in expanding the reach of… → Read More
Facebook Connect is an absolute boon for iPhone developers who want an easy way to add a social layer to their apps. And the service is great for users because it allows them to use the social elements of apps without having to create yet another account with yet another service. It’s a win-win — except when it goes down. As it has today.
Based on several tips and various bitching around the… → Read More
In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling imagines a future where objects are tagged, tracked, and all tell their own stories. He calls these objects “spimes.” I read the book years ago, but it was the first thing I thought of when I visited SendMeHome.
The site is wacky but brilliant. It lets you register any object with a unique code, which is printed out on a small sticker that you place… → Read More
Two big trends in search right now are semantic and social search. Worio, a startup in Vancouver, BC, is combining the two approaches today by tapping its semantic search engine into Facebook Connect. The fundamental technology behind Worio is a semantic tagging system that analyzes the content of indexed Web pages and categorizes them automatically based on what it can glean about the meaning… → Read More
Socialmedian just made an interesting announcement about connecting its services to Facebook in a big way. As of about an hour ago, you can log in and participate on socialmedian with Facebook Connect, which is a noteworthy move considering the fact that socialmedian was recently acquired by European business social networking service Xing, news we broke in December last year.
Socialmedian is… → Read More
You can now add TweetDeck to the growing army of apps that are joining Facebook Connect. TweetDeck is the most popular desktop client for Twitter, and now it will add Facebook functionality as well. When you send out a message from TweetDeck, you will now have the option to send it to Twitter, Facebook, or both. A new column will be added to TweetDeck showing you status updates from your… → Read More
There are way too many comment login systems out there. Each blogging platform (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger) has its own login system, then there are the cross-platform commenting systems like Disqus and JS-KIT. But many of these will soon give way to Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect.
I am talking about just the ID people use to login, not the commenting systems themselves. We … → Read More
Facebook Connect is beginning to materialize and we’re on the ground floor: TechCrunch readers can now use their Facebook accounts to sign in before leaving comments.
Doing so yields several benefits. Most immediately, you’ll no longer have to enter a name, email address and website manually before dropping your two cents. Just click once on the “Connect” button that sits next to the comment form… → Read More
There’s some big Facebook developers meeting going on right now (TechCrunch is all over it, by the way), but while most of it doesn’t really concern CrunchGear per se, the company did announce that Facebook Connect will be coming to the iPhone this fall. Facebook Connect lets developers tap into Facebook from within their own applications. For example, a Twitter program that, when you… → Read More
Facebook will announce later today Facebook Connect, which has similar functionality to MySpace Data Availability, announced just yesterday. The actual product won’t be released for at least a few weeks, so the timing on this, coming immediately after MySpace, is somewhat suspicious. It is essentially a new version of their API for third party websites, which was first launched in August… → Read More
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