Nitobi, creators of the HTML5-based mobile app framework PhoneGap, have today launched the PhoneGap Facebook Connect plugin. The addition of the plugin means that developers building apps using Web technologies like HTML and JavaScript can now simplify the log in process for their apps by allowing users to login with their Facebook credentials.
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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 virality. And then there’s Groupon and maybe Zynga.
But the real question was not whether hype trumps value, but what’s next as the intersection of technology and media accelerates. This year’s broadcast upfronts seemed primed for disruption, with most networks junking their entire drama debuts from a year ago in favor of big budget sci-fi and Sheenless comedies. Meanwhile Netflix continues to mushroom as it becomes the next HBO, or some supernode unlike anything since the agencies took over from the film studios in the ’50s. King Harvest will surely come. → 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 blocking iTunes Ping from accessing their API, we’ve heard (just as AllThingsD and New York Times have as well). Obviously, there’s no point in having a feature that doesn’t work — so Apple simply removed it. → 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 these new social plugins to permeate the web in the same way that Facebook Connect took a year and a half to do. And it seems to suggest that while millions of users seem to be outraged by some of the privacy issues, and the media is ripping Facebook apart for the tools, most content providers on the web don’t seem to care. Or they do, but the lure of connecting with Facebook’s nearly 500 million users is simply too strong. → 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. All anyone would need to unlock the message is a phone with a special barcode scanning app. Stickybits is that app. → 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 websites and devices (including iPhone and Xbox) have implemented Facebook Connect since it launched in December 2008, says Beard. And more than 60 million Facebook users use Facebook Connect each month. And it’s not just a lot of small sites using the product. Two-thirds of comScore’s US Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect. And some of these sites are even bigger than Facebook (perhaps not for long though). → 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 of you on Facebook.
It also pulls your name, and other details from your Facebook profile such as your career. For example, at one point, it flashes the following message to me, “you are squandering your potential as a writer.” Interesting. → 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 of information that TechCrunch writers funnel to it on a regular basis.
We’re excited to announce that these contributions no longer have to remain unattributed. Starting today, anyone with a Facebook account can sign up for an account on CrunchBase by using Facebook Connect. Edits will still be moderated (after all, this is the Internet we’re talking about here), but users who prove themselves to be trustworthy will, with time, start to see additional privileges associated with their accounts.
All of these edits represent a treasure trove of information, so we’ve also been working on ways to better present the edits as they occur. Visitors to the CrunchBase homepage will now notice a list of recent milestones – a “stream,” if you will – that represents the most recent changes to the database. We’ve filtered out the more trivial edits in an effort to make this the kind of real-time information that even Paul Carr could love. These funding rounds, acquisitions, investments, IPOs, and other major milestones will now also appear on the individual pages that they relate to. → 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 ability to rewind the video, highlight clips and save them.
The video player will also incorporate Facebook Connect, to allow people to chat with their friends as they are watching the events. NBC expects the addition of Facebook chat to make the videos a more social and engaging experience, and also hopes viewing times will subsequently increase. → 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 strives to cement itself as the social glue of the Web, offering free translation tools gives developers yet one more reason to choose Facebook Connect over Google Friend Connect or other competing platforms. It gives them access to new markets extremely quickly. Facebook thinks its crowdsourced translation tools are so good that it’s patented them. → 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 Facebook Connect to any mobile phone with a Web browser.
Called Facebook Connect For Mobile Web, it will let any mobile site accept Facebook IDs for sign-on, grab social data from Facebook with permission from the user, publish items into their Facebook stream, and more. → 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 web, it’s pretty clear that Facebook Connect for the iPhone has been broken since yesterday. This of course is a huge problem when a lot of apps rely on the service for their apps to function. Various users are reporting seeing this error when trying to login to an app via Connect: → 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 on the object. The object can be anything from your wallet or iPhone to a beloved frying pan. Ostensibly, the purpose of doing this is that if you should ever lose the object, anyone who finds it can contact you through SendMeHome. By entering the code on the sticker, they can learn anything you’ve decided to share about yourself or the object, and can contact you anonymously. SendMeHome offers this service for free, but charges $3.99 for a pack of stickers. (It doesn’t get involved in actually getting your item back to you).
The lost-and-found feature is the only practical reason you would use the service. But once you’ve attached a sticker to a favorite object and registered it on the site, there are other things you can do with it. You can tell a story about the object, pass it around, or put it on a mission. It is on its way to becoming a spime,. These spimes are “always associated with a story. . . . they are protagonists of a documented process,” as Sterling once described it. → 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 of the text. It provides both normal search results and a discovery feed based on the tags. Search results can be saved in a library of links.
Now, with the Facebook Connect implementation, which just went live a few minutes ago, Worio can tap into your profile, your friends, and your feed to further personalize search results. Worio actually indexes your profile and feed. Any time somebody shares a link on your feed, the entire page gets analyzed and tagged by Worio, and added to its index (which currently is made up of about 100 million pages, culled down from one billion found by its crawler). Worio is less concerned with quantity than quality, as far as its index is concerned, and adding links recommended by friends is a really good filter for quality links. → 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 essentially a personalized news filter that integrates well with social networking platforms. It aggregates news articles from around the web, blogosphere and social services like Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc. which are then filtered by topic. Users can pre-define which keywords and topics they’d like to receive news on, and they can also submit articles to the site with the help of a bookmarklet. Stories can be viewed either in chronological order or according to popularity on the network. → 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 Facebook friends (in addition to the existing columns for Tweets from people you follow on Twitter, replies, and direct messages). And if one of your Facebook friends is online, a green dot appears by their name and you can chat with them through Facebook chat via a pop-up window.
TweetDeck will be rolling out the new feature over the next few days. A version of the update will be posted here for those who want to upgrade manually.
TweetDeck is just the latest app to join the Facebook Connect Army. On Saturday, Facebook announced that Facebook Connect now works with iPhone apps and desktop apps such as Seesmic. With Tweetdeck, Facebook ventures into the realm of Twitter apps. By going after the Twitter apps, Facebook can do an end-run around Twitter. Tweetdeck alone accounts of about 13 percent of all Twitter users. → 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 adopted Facebook Connect as a login option for anyone who wants to leave a comment on TechCrunch, and it already accounts for more than 20 percent of our comments. FB Connect is also now available to any of the 500,000 blogs and sites that use the JS-Kit commenting widget, and Disqus is planning on implementing Facebook Connect before the end of the year. → 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 and we’ll automatically detect who you are, even on return visits.
Hooking things up with Facebook also lets us display your profile portrait in miniature form next to your name in the header of comments. Your name conveniently links to your Facebook profile as well, making it easier for other commenters to get in touch with you and perhaps become your virtual friends. → 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 choose to get info from someone, takes you to their Facebook profile. I think “neat” is just the word to describe that: not too impressive, not too boring, just sorta in the middle there. I’ll leave it to our resident iPhone owners Peter and John to pontificate on how big a deal this is for iPhone users generally. → Read More
