Facebook Connect, check

It’s about time I mention this, I’ve had a draft laying around for almost 3 months with the title ‘Social Connect’ which referred to the release of Google Connect. Since then, a lot of things have happened in the “open social world”, Facebook launched Facebook Connect, which lets you sign in to an external site using your Facebook identity. This is useful in many ways; obviously people with a Facebook account will never have to register for your site, but it also creates additional sharing (and caring) opportunities.

As an example, if you sign in on Oscar and Friends using your Facebook identity and then make a comment to a post, Facebook Connect will ask whether or not you’d like to publish this comment to your Facebook feed, displaying what you wrote here in your Facebook profile, handy.

This is all made possible thanks to a nifty Facebook engineer named Adam Hupp and his Facebook Connect plugin for WordPress. There’s also another popular WordPress plugin called Sociable! which does the same thing, Sociable! also adds more community effects to your site. I found that the basic (and somewhat official) one is the cleanest and does not interfere too much with your normal ‘business’. There has also been similar plugins developed for a lot of other platforms.

Try it out and publish it to your feed to see what it looks like!