Oh no! There's a site which tricks you into handing over your personal information for its own nefarious, moneymaking schemes! It's called Facebook. Oh, also, people are all upset because FBstarter.com is stealing their passwords.
Social networks have a lifecycle: They start with a small core of early adopters, swell as mainstream users get pulled in by their friends, and then see growth taper off as people get turned off by spam. That's why Friendster is forgotten and why MySpace is looking increasingly stagnant. The price for reaching an audience advertisers care about seems to be a site users can't stand. Facebook, however, isn't following the fashionable trend.
Facebook has shut off access to Google's new Friend Connect, citing privacy issues, saying that the service "redistributes data" in ways that users don't "expect or understand," according to a blog post by Facebook developer Charlie Cheever. Google Friend Connect collected and displayed information available through Facebook's tools for third-party web developers to use on their own sites. Funny, Facebook hasn't had a problem with tracking users on third-party sites in the past, but then Facebook just launched a similarly named tool, Facebook Connect.
Facebook's formal announcement of Facebook Connect is at once a transparently timed response to MySpace's announcement of partnerships with eBay and Twitter yesterday and the culmination of things the social network has been working on for ages. Facebook Connect, at its simplest, lets websites like Digg and Twitter integrate their users' activity into Facebook users' News Feeds. Those two companies, as well as Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa, have been using Facebook Connect well before it was unveiled under that name. It cements Facebook's role as a central place to keep up with one's friends. Yet I'm not sure how I feel about it.
