@Pickard: Given the clear lack of discussion at your blog, I encourage you to take up the discussion here (unless you can point to another venue where the pros and cons of FBC and GFC are being discussed). I see nobody will offer any rebuttal to any of the concerns being addressed in the comments here (referring only to the "reasonable" ones, not conspiracy theories), but thought you might take the lead as the author of the deck. While I appreciate you noting the risks, 1 slide out of 29 seems to significantly minimize the issues.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/distributed_social_networking.php

And, an article looking for openID participation:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_openid_foundation_board.php

Most of us that follow these topics and understand the implications of any this becoming widespread understood the concepts of the presentation as soon as Beacon launched and FBC was announced months ago (May?).

Razorfish smartly put together a slide deck to demonstrate what the implications for widespread usage of this tech are to less involved/ savvy members of the marketing world that command large budgets. "Kudos!"

I believe in the values espoused in The Cluetrain Manifesto and that more VRM tools/ protections are required before we start inviting large commercial entities into our personal communications with unmitigated access for direct communication with us (no-call list is/was popular for a reason). Not to mention having no foreseeable way to retract our contact info once it has been given.

Are the ideas being presented, in anyway, convenient for the person or company espousing them? Yes, indubitably.

I simply do not understand why I would need to tell everyone what I am doing or buying, nor do I need their opinion and/or consent.

People have sheep mentalities that are unhealthy as it is, but encouraging these types of behaviors only reinforces a lack of independent thinking.

Note that Pickard only chimes in to thank Kirkpatrick, not to engage in the discussion being had here.

You won't want your friends to know about the darker side which we all have. Imagine if every site integrated this feature and suddenly your friends and significant other(s) knew of your late night wanderings into adult oriented content. Or your boss watching your job hunting on Monster.com.

Imagine the wall post:
"Bob bought the Jenna Jamison Real Doll from Adam & Eve."
"Bob applied for the position of High School Counselor."

Things could get ugly...

The idea of personalizing ITunes and Amazon is outstanding, specifically seeing how your social network feels about new albums or books, rather than Apple Employees and the general public. As most peoples tastes are pretty distinct, it would be great to review products using our social networks, especially people that we admire their taste. Your own personal Oprah, if you will .

Personally I feel that this is a win for all companies, and especially the user, and the iPhone games idea is a pretty sweet sidenote. Anyone up for a game of scrabble?

Jess
www.privacy.mx.tc

what protections has facebook put in place around "ownership" of the data that third-party sites retrieve? what data is not allowed out? why? if data is allowed to be retrieved from facebook via facebook connect, can it be stored by the third-party? if so, for how long? must it be encrypted when it is transmitted and stored? must it be deleted after a period of time? if meta data is created as a result of the data pulled in from facebook, who owns it?

i think developers are flocking to fb connect because of the lure of the richness of the data, but the devil is in the details. many sites may be sacrificing their long-term viability by tying up and creating a strict dependency on facebook data and network transfers. AND, there is NOT a counterweight to Facebook for this data. Forget it. Putting Google Friend Connect on the site does nothing to limit a site's dependence on facebook at all.

So am I to understand that Amazon and iTunes are going to forfeit the most important part of their business model, the user, so they can then spam friends on facebook about music and book specials. Amazon and iTunes are healthy profitable businesses, Facebook is a money sink hole with no clear revenue model.

I remember when the Facebook Platform was announced and everyone jumped to it like sheep and in the end it ruined Facebook with vampire bites and zombie buzz spam. It was a complete disaster.

Connect is no different, it is Beacon repackaged, lets not be fooled. The social graph was not meant to be connected to openness because we are not meant to relay back to our friends everything we do online, and likewise our friends have no interest in getting bombarded with offers related to my activity.

People lets not follow the Facebook marketing buzz so blindly; the whole connect idea is a closed garden meant to provide facebook with additional control of our habits so they can try to formulate one last ditch effort at a revenue model they so desperately need before going bust.

I use Open ID and it gives me the 2 most important things I want, anonymity and universal access to sites. What else do we need? Lets keep this simple. Twitter is great because it is simple not a complicated social graph maze of gossip.

This whole "announce your clicks and movements back to your feed and lets be social" is clever marketing and sounds sexy at first, but lets all just pause for a second and think..at the end of the day when you go shopping do you want your friends, family and even strangers to know what you did, where you went and what you bought? Likewise do those people want to be offered and solicited by the stores you went to? Do want VISA or MASTERCARD controlling your purchasing habits and passing them on to other retailers? Do you want a company like Facebook (a company modeled in the closed network, proprietary software model of Microsoft) to follow you around the web and control your data?

Lets all be careful, especially when dealing with facebook and the PR and Marketing companies they pay to shovel the Powerpoint Presentations into our heads. it is a scam, and a dangerous one at that. Support OPEN ID, it is neutral, anonymous, and safe!

Social media tries to resemble social interactiveness in real life. But even in real life, at times we try to avoid some certain people (even our closest friends) to prevent them from interacting with (/disturbing) us.

So interesting that a short time ago Microsoft (A closed source company) wanted to push forward a standard (Passport) that would have give users the ability to have one log in that worked for many sites. At the time many in the tech and development community saw this as just another Microsoft Land Grab for our Identity and our Content. Many people saw Passport as a Microsoft effort to finally gain control of the internet by becoming the standard for digital identity.

Today we have no less than 3 closed source companies in a race to become the "Standard" for holding or Identity and therefore having access to the content that we read and the content that we creates.

All of this at a time when there are many Open Source standards that could be used (Openid is just one that comes to mind) that if properly deployed would do the right thing by putting the user/member in charge of their log in as well as their relationships across many sites.

Have we forgotten the lesson of the not so distance past ?

Why do we not see a problem with the big 3 trying to become the proprietary standard in this very important area ?

Why do developers especially Open Source developers continue to build and extend applications for closed source companies that under mind open source standards and ideals ?

Why do users continue to view giving control of their identity and content to these companies as a win, when in fact the win is clearly on the side of the company that you have allowed to take control of your identity and to generate value and revenue from your content. In return for our compliance we do not even have a right to take our identity and our content where we want.

I may have this wrong, but that's how it looks to us at the moment.

Anyone?