Nicholas Carlson reports that Facebook Connect, the service that allows Facebook users to log into third-party sites using their Facebook credentials, is seeing rapid adoption. Just seven months after launch, over ten thousand sites have integrated the service — from mainstream hangouts like Hulu, to geek havens like Digg, to personal WordPress blogs through a plugin.
So what’s so hot about Facebook Connect, especially in competition with Google Friend Connect? I’ve compared the two services in a previous post, but here’s what Facebook itself has to say about the benefits of Facebook Connect:
Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.
Note that last line comparing Facebook to search. Facebook’s people-driven, walled-garden approach to organizing Web content is in direct opposition to Google’s machine-driven, open-Web approach. The social startup has no qualms about openly challenging the search giant with that approach. With advertisers ever-hungry for personal information and social graph data, not just on Facebook but across the Web, Facebook Connect may be Zuckerberg’s ace in the hole.
Originally posted on July 2, 2009 @ 9:57 am