

Why Facebook Connect Is Bound For Success - senthil_rajasek
http://www.pcworld.com/article/154990/first_look_why_facebook_connect_is_bound_for_success.html

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kwamenum86
Until reading that article I thought this experiment was doomed to fail but it
does have some potential. I hate signing up for new sites and it is cool to
see friends' activities (if they choose to share them). My only concern would
be sending my login information using plain text through these third party
sites. It appears that Facebook uses https for login but its the strength of
the weakest link that matters, and in this case if my credentials are passed
via plain text to an outside site and then routed to Facebook that is no good.

Of course I have not tried it out yet so maybe they route you to a (secure) fb
page to login, which is perfect.

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unalone
They've had something like this for a while, and that's exactly how it works.
Log-in stays secure.

I don't know if they'll make money off of this, and that's Facebook's achilles
heel, but I've never understood the people who mock Facebook's features. It's
the most comprehensive site I've ever used. And this is another excellent step
for them.

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kwamenum86
In my opinion they are mocked because they have not introduced any
groundbreaking features. They have a lot of cool features that can be found
elsewhere. They are recreating what others have tried but doing it better.

Their accomplishments are execution (making a lot of features work together
without crappifying the site) and scale. This is still remarkable but it does
not help you avoid mocking.

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unalone
I think that their privacy implementation was the first of its kind. That was
the first site that I joined that didn't give me a URL. It was all about being
a closed system, and I loved that and still do.

I'd also say that their ridiculous emphasis on minimalism should count as
groundbreaking, because no other site gets that right, but that always leads
to arguments.

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kwamenum86
I don't think you can call it groundbreaking if someone else is already doing
it (I am taking the word at its most literal I guess i.e. breaking new
ground).

Their privacy system is similar to MySpace's except they apply it to more
things. MySpace had a system that allowed you to restrict certain things from
non-friends before Facebook. Facebook's privacy system has become much more
robust though.

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unalone
I think the breaking ground was that Facebook's primary feature was security.
MySpace had it, but they didn't emphasize it, and even when security was on,
they tried to make profiles display like public pages - they just made them
sparser.

Facebook introduced the completely blank page that you get when you try to go
to a restricted profile. It was pretty cutting edge when I registered in
2005-06.

