Connect – Friend or Facebook
Last week was for Google Friend Connect. It was very easy to setup and I deployed it to Top10Reads very fast. Then I thought.
What I want to accomplish is to create a great social experience. What’s the first site that comes to mind when talking about a online social experience? Google? Nope. For search yes, innovation, yes, but an online user community not yet. Perhaps never.
So I checked to see what else is there. Both Facebook and MySpace introduced their own versions of ’friend connect’ late last year around the same time as Google’s Friend Connect.
Since I personally use Facebook, I thought I’d try out their solution. Compared with Google it took me much longer to go through the documentation and set this up on my site. Unlike Google, Facebook is already established in the ’social experience’ space and there seems to be an already available and willing user base willing to try out new apps.
Some other data points that I used; I’ve got about 10 friends that I exchange gmail with vs about 150 in my Facebook network. Another data point is that I have an ad on both Facebook and Google. I get twice as many hits from FB as I do from Google when both sites have roughly the same budget.
Facebook Connect seems to be the way to go now. It’s a gamble, but I hope that I picked the right integration for the site!