What is Facebook Connect?

Posted by Cotton Rohrscheib on Sep 10th, 2009 | Comments

Facebook is the largest social networking destination on the web today, and it’s continued growth and popularity is fascinating.  One of our most requested features is Facebook Connect, this allows Facebook users to use their Facebook accounts to interact on your website as well as sharing information with their friends on Facebook.  Here is a good explanation of Facebook Connect from Facebook’s blog:

Facebook Connect is the next evolution of Facebook Platform – enabling you to integrate the power of Facebook Platform into your own site.  Enable your users to…

• Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
• Connect and find their friends who also use your site
• Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

Trusted Authentication

Users can connect their Facebook account with any partner Web site using our simplified and trusted authentication. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user can authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.

Real Identity

Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

Friend Linking

People count on Facebook to stay connected to their friends and family. With Facebook Connect, they can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers can add rich social context to their sites. Developers even can dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.

Dynamic Privacy

As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow them, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up to date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external site. And the users can control who can see what pieces of their information – the same rules that they set on Facebook can be applied through your site too using our dynamic privacy controls.

Social Distribution

As a user moves around the open Web, they discover interesting content, share information about themselves, and engage in a lot of experiences. With Facebook Connect, users can easily share and distribute this information and actions to their friends via Facebook Feed, requests, and notifications.

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