Forum Moderators: rogerd
In a speech at his company’s annual conference for developers, called F8, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 24-year-old chief executive, also demonstrated the company’s new design. He predicted that there would soon be a wave of social Web sites built on top of the information users give to social networks.“We are going to see the big social networks start to decentralize into a series of social applications across the Web,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I think we are at the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.”
To carve out a piece of that future, the company announced Facebook Connect, a way that other Web sites can integrate parts of Facebook’s service. Web sites can ask users for their Facebook user name and password, instead of creating an identity verification system themselves, and offer their users the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook.
F8 doesn't have the best reputation when it comes to privacy, so let's dig into the documentation and implementation and see if there are any flaws. Is this much different from the F8 API?
"Facebook Connect" will transform the social network from a private site where activity occurs entirely within a "walled garden" to a Web-wide phenomenon where software makers, with user permission, can tap member data for use on their sites.
I think this is a "left turn"...
[edited by: Tastatura at 2:59 pm (utc) on July 24, 2008]
Facebook user name and password
Probably not. There's certainly precedent for sites getting your webmail access info to import those contacts. I don't recall if Facebook is one of them. As a user, though, I'd be really careful with this - I'd provide that info only to a small number of large sites, and only with their assurance that the information wouldn't be stored.
Then again, maybe it's a generational thing. Many FB users expose huge amounts of personal info on the site. Are these people going to think twice about third party site security?
I'm with rogerd, I don't like sharing that easily.
