While it's true MySpace's commitment to member customization allowed the community's lowest common denominators to bring down the look of the site, Facebook's aesthetic has also suffered with 3rd party app integration. This is hardly a reason for such a mass migration. And because MySpace and Facebook both offer Blackberry and iPhone applications, it's also unlikely that mobile access played a huge part in MySpace's demise as market leader.

Dougherty's assessment about Facebook Connect is likely the key reason for such dramatic traffic growth given her enclosed time line. As high traffic services like Disqus, Digg and WordPress began using Facebook Connect, members found cross-platform distribution with ease-of-use. Facebook moved from being a College forum site to a full scale lifestyle platform. Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system.

In early June Inside Facebook reported that Americans spent 13.9 billion minutes per year on Facebook and 5 billion minutes on MySpace. When you remember that Facebook doesn't allow for time-consuming html-based profile customizations, you realize the feat they've accomplished. Rather than depending solely on its employees, Facebook's success relies on the fact that it increases its value through its 15,000 Facebook Connect members and more than 50,000 app developers.

Mossinac describes the implementation of "Facebook Connect for Mobile Web" as simple. With only four lines of code, developers can add a Facebook Connect button to their app in order to make it more social. The only requirement for implementation is that the handset has to have a web browser. In other words, "any site, any application, and any platform" can now tap into Facebook's APIs.

During the speech, Mossinac revealed how successful mobilizing Facebook's website has been for the company. In the past month, Facebook saw 65 million visitors accessing the site from mobile phones. This includes access via the mobile website itself as well as from SMS and other specialized mobile applications. It also represents a dramatic increase from December when only 20 million mobile users were counted.

Currently, the company has deals with 180 mobile operators worldwide. The U.S., U.K., and Canada are the biggest markets. However, Mossinac said emerging markets are growing fast. For example, "Facebook Indonesia is on fire," he noted. "The metrics are amazing."

Facebook's Goals

The announcement of the new mobile platform isn't just a play by Facebook to get more users to visit their site. The company's overall goal is to make applications - both mobile and otherwise - more social. "What we did for photo sharing, we are going to do for mobile applications," said Mossinac. He's referring to how Facebook introduced a way to make sharing photos a more social process. No longer do you have to visit a separate website and plow through photo after photo to find the ones of you and your friends. Instead, with Facebook's ability to "tag" photos, the addition of new and interesting photos to the social network are announced via messages posted to your News Feed.

By socializing mobile applications, you'll be able to share more about your off-site activity with your friends in much of the same way. This will be especially helpful for the mobile games market, as it allows you to invite Facebook friends to play with you while also sharing scores, stats, and other information to your profile. For game developers, it means one person playing a mobile application can spread the word about it among hundreds of their friends. In addition, Facebook Connect eases the sign-in process for apps by using your Facebook identity instead of forcing you to create a new account.

"Facebook Connect for Mobile Web" is only one way the company is expanding to other platforms. They plan to integrate their technology on every screen, including that of your TV (already available thanks to Verizon FiOS's new widgets) and your game console (another new arrival via Xbox 360's recent update).

Mossinac also announced the introduction of a new Facebook app for Nokia's Series 40 devices. The app will allow for status updates from a homescreen widget.

Streamy as a Social Media Aggregator

You can use Streamy as a self-contained system to read your feeds, follow other users, share posts with your followers, and even chat with them, but the service really works best once you connect it to other social media services. Starting next week, Streamy will also implement Facebook Connect for signing in to the service, so your Facebook and Streamy friends will be automatically synchronized.

When you open up Streamy, you are greeted with a homepage that can aggregate updates from your friends on various social media services, as well as a list of recommended stories.

Currently, Streamy lets you import your Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and FriendFeed accounts, and from within Streamy, you can easily update your status on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook. For Twitter, by the way, Streamy is one of the first services that feature authentication through oAuth.

Customization

Streamy's Twitter, Flickr, and Friendfeed pages are highly customizable. You can, for example, add widgets for specific searches, users, or your direct messages and replies to your Twitter account. The Friendfeed and Flickr pages only feature search widgets. Overall, these features feel a lot like what you can do in Tweetdeck, though the only problem is that the search widgets don't seem to auto-update.

RSS Reader

But Streamy isn't just a social media aggregator; it is also a very capable RSS reader. If you are a Google Reader or Bloglines user, you will be able to import your subscriptions, or you can import an OPML file from any other feed reader.

From within Streamy, you can just drag a link and a circular user interface pops up. To send a link to Friendfeed, for example, you just have to drop the link onto the Friendfeed icon.

Interface

When we looked at Streamy's first beta almost two years ago, the service looked very different, though the core of the service, as well as the innovative drop-zone interface and the highly responsive AJAX interface still remain. Streamy also still features a very interesting chat function (including group chat), which used to be at the core of the original service, but has now been pushed towards the sidelines in favor of a stronger focus on social media aggregation.

One cool feature of Streamy is that you can drag and drop almost everything. This means, for example, that you can drag a shortcut to your favorite blogs to Streamy's title bar at the top of the page.

A Few Things We Would Like to See

Of course, Streamy isn't perfect. It is currently not possible to reply to tweets directly from Streamy, for example, which is definitely a problem, especially considering that you can comment on FriendFeed items directly from Streamy. On the other hand, though, Streamy won't let you 'like' a FriendFeed item. Streamy's co-founder Don Mosites, however, tells us that these features are in the works and should become available soon.

One feature we would also really love to see in Streamy's RSS reader would be the ability to get a river-of-news-style view for folders. Once you subscribe to more than twenty blogs or so, going from one blog to the next to see what's new just becomes tiresome. Again, Don tells us that this is just a matter of flipping a switch, and we hope Streamy will do so soon. For now, you can just drag and drop your folders to the title bar and Streamy will open a river-of-news-style view for you when you click on the icon there.

Verdict

Once Streamy adds those features we mention above, it can easily become a great alternative to Google Reader and Tweetdeck. It's already one of the most fully-featured social media aggregators we have seen. We highly enjoyed testing the service over the last few days and we highly recommend that you give it a try as well.

But the news again brings up the question of whether we should trust this company that seems to continuously place user privacy on the back burner almost every time it announces some new or innovative feature.

1. Give developers an easy way to socially enable their applications without having to write a whole supporting back-end
2. To promote the Facebook Connect platform and give iPhone users with Facebook accounts an easy way to share information

While the majority of participating iPhone applications announced today are games - see the full list here - clearly the company expects other mobile platforms and a greater selection of applications for the mobile market to jump on the bandwagon.

But will they - and more importantly, should they?

Apologies Aplenty from Facebook

Last summer, we wrote about the potential dangers of Facebook Connect. At the time, MySpace ruled supreme in the United States but recently, Facebook has taken over. While the turnaround wasn't really surprising, it may make our point from last year all the more relevant:

"Facebook Connect put the power of the social web into the hands of one company. One private company. Not only that, but a company that's known for rolling out changes without so much as a warning to its users then having to react to the ensuing uproar."

The example we used at the time was the much maligned Beacon, the advertising system that sent data from external sites back to Facebook, and its disastrous beginnings with a default opt-out setting, that launched before users were given a way to opt-out.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's response after the debacle: "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it."

Zuckerberg again was all about regret in February this year, when he revoked the changes Facebook made to its Terms of Service.

Both examples of backtracking and apologies only came about after a backlash from users.

We also pointed out that it appears Facebook's direction has changed somewhat when it comes to privacy, and wrote that it's still difficult to imagine this is due to the company genuinely caring, and more likely the result that they've learned to cater to users' demands.

"Facebook has always known that their value - that is, their monetary value - is selling off bits and pieces of your privacy to advertisers. The "real you" on Facebook is a holy grail for marketers."

With that in mind, what will become of the new Facebook Connect for iPhone service? While no doubt it will be useful to many of Facebook's 175 million users, the question remains: Should we trust in Facebook as it figures out how to cash in on the power of the mobile Web?

We found the DropPlay interface painless and fun to use. The YouTube integration was pretty seamless and there is a quick setting to compensate for a slow network connection. Plus, there is a lot of potential for the social side to really explode with the decision to go with Facebook Connect. It's still a little rough, but for an initial beta release, overall, we don't have a lot of nits to pick with the way it works.

However, we do have some thoughts we'd like to address overall.

First, just like with Muziic, this service leverages YouTube specifically for music videos (via the YouTube API) and appears to not honor YouTube's advertising model. This means that it is, in essence, getting the 'milk for free,' something that we believe can last only so long until Google clamps down on this sort of behavior, either by making the API more restrictive or being more aggressive about removing music videos.

Second, although Facebook Connect is used so that you can easily log in, find Facebook friends, and save playlists, there is no export option once your playlists are created. This means that all the work you do lives in this app, and you must resign yourself to a possible future where the site may disappear one day and any playlists or shares will vanish with it.

Finally, there seems to be no support for sharing any discoveries you make in DropPlay with outside services, except perhaps your Facebook friend's wall. There's no link back to the original YouTube video and no sharing options via email or other social network. While this approach seems to mimic Facebook's own original 'walled garden' approach, even Facebook realizes they themselves must become more open and share more social graph data with other networks.

If it did, that could be a real game changer. We'd love to introduce our smart and sassy readers to each other here and then see them be friends on social networks, mobile sites and all around the web. Just a pipe dream? That's what a brand new identity provider called Cliqset aims to make possible. We believe it's the first identity provider of its type that allows 3rd parties to change user profile information, not just read it.

Cliqset uses the OAuth data standard to do all this, so it doesn't even have to ask for your password to the networks you want to connect.

Who's using Cliqset so far? Unfortunately, the geeks behind Cliqset don't do a very good job explaining what they do and they don't have any examples other than their own site today at launch.

That could change soon, though. The company has released a variety of code libraries for developers to drop Cliqset support into their applications. At launch there are Java, iPhone and .net for Windows Mobile libraries. A PHP library is forthcoming. All the libraries will be open sourced and posted to Google Code.

Facebook Connect lets 3rd parties publish updates to a user's activity stream, but that's about it. We asked a number of hardcore identity geeks whether they had seen anything quite like Cliqset before and no one had. There are OpenID and related specifications aiming to accomplish just this, but nothing in the wild yet, according to the OpenID Foundation and Six Apart's David Recordon.

Recordon is a little concerned about seeing another company release an API to accomplish what Cliqset aims to do. "At first glance, it seems like Cliqset is leaning in the correct direction with their support of OAuth for APIs and OpenID for sign in, but are still creating their own APIs - ala Facebook Connect - when dealing with profiles and activities," he told us. "This is both yet another validation of the work by the wider DiSo community and opportunity to finalize the Portable Contacts and Activity Streams specifications for broad adoption on the social web."

We asked Cliqset specifically about Facebook Connect, whether it wasn't in the company's interest to implement a Read/Write capability in its identity system as well. They said they believed it was but that they expected the giant social network to take much longer to implement this key feature. By offering iPhone and Windows Mobile libraries right out of the gate, we think Cliqset could move quickly in the mobile world as well.

Unfortunately, the company isn't doing a terribly good job of explaining its fundamental value proposition so far. We're not the first site to cover Cliqset today (see PC World's coverage for example) and everyone else is writing up the company as just one more cross-site identity provider. There's more than that going on here, but we'll see if this startup with what it calls "the most robust APIs you'll find anywhere" is able to make the market headway that its innovative vision seems to warrant.

Jay Freeman is the man behind both the Cydia application and the Cydia Store, too. Freeman, a 27-year-old computer science doctoral student in Santa Barbara, Calif., said he wanted there to be a way for developers like him to make money from their efforts. Already his software, Cydia, which permits the installation of non-approved applications on jailbroken iPhones has been installed on 1.7 million devices. (For more information on jailbreaking, including why you should do it, click here. Please note, however, Apple now considers this illegal).

With the Cydia Store and its soon-to-be plentiful list of paid applications (at the moment, the sole paid application in the Cydia store is Freeman's own contact manager enhancement, "Cyntact," which sells for a dollar), developers with grand ideas will no longer need to worry about the stifling Apple approval process in which the company invokes strict rules about the types of applications which can run on the iPhone. Instead, developers are free to pursue whatever ideas spark their fancy, and thanks to the Cydia Store, they will actually be able to profit from their work.

Already, Cydia users have access to a plethora of useful iPhone applications including video recorders, zoomable cameras, GPS apps with turn-by-turn directions, themes, and much more. Although some Cydia apps were for sale before, they were generally offered for free but included "nag screens" which encouraged users to upgrade to the full-featured paid version. Now that developers can sell apps directly, however, they won't need to offer these "lite" versions in order to drive sales. That means it's entirely possible that we'll see even more high quality applications appear in the near future. Cydia creator Freeman himself notes that a few large design houses wanted to do professional themes for the iPhone, for example, and the Cydia Store makes this possible.

Facebook and Google Login Options

As for what's in store for the new Cydia Store, Freeman tells us that many new features and packages are coming soon. At the moment, Amazon Payments is being used to send money to the application developers, but PayPal support will launch later this week. Freeman also hinted earlier on Twitter about Facebook Connect and Google login integration with the store, but when asked how that would work exactly, he had cryptically commented: "you will see how that works when I release it."

As it turns out, both login options are available today and both are as easy to use as they are on the web. You simply select either the Facebook option or the Google option, enter in your account information, and you'll be taken to a screen where you can pay for your purchase. With Amazon Payments you can choose to either simply "pay now" or you can choose to "pay now" and keep your information on file for later purchases. When PayPal launches later this week, we expect it may offer similar options.

Bring on the Apps!

But what's a store without some applications for sale? Freeman says more paid applications are arriving soon. In addition to the one app there now, he says two more packages will be added later this week with many more arriving the following week and in those that follow. Cydia's store will feature some DRM-free applications but will also support the existing DRM in commercial applications like Snapture (the zoomable iPhone camera).

We hope that the availability of a store will encourage more developers to list their applications and tweaks on Cydia instead of just posting them on various message board around the net. For example, we've found some of the best Winterboard themes on the MacThemes Forum, but often, they're never added into Cydia.

Cydia is Not for Pirated Apps, It's for Better Apps

It's important to realize that what Cydia offers is not pirated or cracked applications - it's just an alternative iPhone app marketplace for the apps that Apple would never approve. And as far as jailbreaking being illegal? Well, that's being hotly debated now. No matter Apple's stand, it will be something that's hard to enforce, especially when people see the forbidden fruit that awaits them just beyond Apple's walled garden.

By partnering with JS-Kit, a service that powers comments and ratings on sites big (like AOL and Sun Microsystems) and small (JS-Kit bought up old school market leader Haloscan in July), Yahoo! Updates is coming out of the gate in a big way. How does its technology compare to Facebook Connect?

Facebook Connect has been lauded for its usability; so much so that advocates of OpenID felt deeply threatened until Facebook teamed up to work with them on the OpenID user experience. In contrast, the Yahoo/JS-Kit user experience is immediately quite usable and full-featured. The same type of pop-up window asks users to grant permission to JS-Kit (or any other site using Yahoo! Updates) to access their Yahoo! profile information. There are a few extra boxes users have to click in order to grant that permission, but that's the extent of the complications. You can test the implementation on this page.

We're quite impressed with the technology and we're always appreciative of the way that Yahoo! supports open standards. It's not as if the company is accepting 3rd party OpenID login on Yahoo! sites yet, but all these other little steps are quite significant.

One thing that Yahoo! doesn't currently offer is syndication of off-site activities into Yahoo! properties. The company says that's coming soon.

In the coming months, as Updates are implemented across Yahoo!, publishers will enjoy referral traffic back to their sites from across the Yahoo! Network (more than 500M+ monthly unique visitors)...Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Profiles, etc.

If you thought Facebook represented the mainstream face of newsfeeds, 3rd party identity authentication, etc. just imagine what Yahoo! could do. The only question is whether the giant company will move fast enough - Facebook is very close to having stolen its thunder already. Yahoo! has been talking about "opening up" and integrating social data across its sites for months, Facebook tends to be much, much faster at taking action and innovating.

Facebook Connect is also available on JS-Kit supported pages, so it's not as if Yahoo! has surpassed Connect. We've asked Facebook for a precise number of pages that Connect is available on and are awaiting a reply. We do know that the company says that 6,000 developers have implemented Connect, but for all we know that number includes JS-Kit with its 600,000 sites as just one developer.

What do you think of the new JS-Kit/Yahoo! tie-in? Would you use it on sites where both it and Facebook Connect are an option? You can test Facebook Connect here on our site or both Connect and the new Yahoo! Updates commenting over on Guy Kawasaki's blog.

Gartner's survey of 4000 U.S. adults in September 2008, once again demonstrated people's tendencies to opt for convenience over security. It's a trend that has stayed fairly consistent over the years despite the fact that an increasing amount of activity occurs online these days thanks to the growth of cloud computing.

According to Gregg Kreizman, research director at Gartner, "most consumers want to continue managing their passwords the way they do now." But the way they do now is nothing to brag about. It generally consists of one or two passwords which the consumer uses on every website they encounter.

What should be done about this? According to Kreizman, online product and service vendors should redouble their marketing efforts to illustrate the advantages and practicality of routine and stronger authentication for consumers. Another analyst, Avivah Litan, also notes that "enterprises with consumer-facing websites that require stronger controls than weak password authentication alone should continue to augment passwords with complementary mechanisms, such as device identification, geolocation and transaction verification."

Elephant in the Room: Facebook Connect

While these findings are relatively unsurprising, the study highlights one of the top issues when it comes to security: the human factor. For most people, convenience is key, even if it means putting their security at risk. Consumers would rather rely on service providers to protect their safety than change their own age-old habits.

Yet the one thing the study didn't address is what impact Facebook Connect will have on the user authentication ecosystem. Unlike OpenID (new sign-in boxes notwithstanding), Facebook Connect makes sense to the user. People immediately understand what it means to sign in using their Facebook account. What's more, the process is easier and faster than creating a new username/password combination for the website in question. That should prove well for its adoption and acceptance among consumers.

In addition, Facebook Connect solves problems that go beyond the security issue alone. Sites implementing the technology can gain access to your friend lists, too - a boon for social networking-type sites and those wishing to become more social. There's also the great, untapped potential of how Facebook Connect could make the Internet a kinder, more transparent place. When people have to be identified - and are not anonymous - the chance they'll engage in "troll-like" behavior (leaving rude, disruptive comments) is reduced. It could also impact sites that rely heavily on user reviews. No longer could marketers, business owners, and content producers game the system by leaving glowing - yet fake - reviews which are then hoisted upon unsuspecting visitors.

For those reasons and more, Facebook Connect could very well become the next big authentication methodology on the web. Personal opinion aside, it's hard to ignore the potential of this social networking giant.

But while Facebook Connect may eventually solve the security issue of a commonly used username and password among consumers, it's important to realize that it will introduce security concerns of its own. If this technology becomes ubiquitous, we'll have to face the consequences of putting all the power of authentication into the hands of one private company, which many fear do not have our best interests at heart - especially when it comes to privacy.

And that makes us think that perhaps a common, often-repeated password may not be such a bad thing after all. 

Google, of course, already offers a similar service with Google Friend Connect, though this offers far more features than just the ability to leave comments. Google also allows users to sign in with an OpenID account, as well as with accounts from other vendors, including Yahoo and AOL. In the announcement, Facebook stresses that this is just the first of a number of social widgets based on Facebook Connect that the company is planning to release in the near future.

It is important to note that other commenting services like JS-Kit already allow users to use their Facebook Connect logins - something that Facebook actually acknowledges in its announcement.

Features

Publishers will be able to customize the widget and moderate comments, though it is not clear what this moderation will look like. Users without a Facebook Connect ID will also be able to leave comments, but we will have to wait and see how well Facebook's widget will be able handle the inevitable spam that will come with this.

One nice feature of the Facebook Connect widget is that your comments are not only posted to your Facebook profile, but that additional comments that your friends make on Facebook in reference to your comment will also appear on the originating site. This, as Nick O'Neill points out, is similar to what a number of blog plugins like IntenseDebate are doing with comments left on Friendfeed right now. For publishers, this also means that their content is going to get a wider exposure on Facebook.

However, while being able to use the Facebook Connect ID to sign into a comments system is nice, most publishers are probably looking for a system that can handle a wider range of sign-on credentials. Facebook is now a member of the OpenID Foundation, but the widget only supports Facebook Connect IDs.

Breaking out of the Silo

What is most important about this announcement, though, is that Facebook continues to open up its platform to third parties. Earlier this month, third-party developers got access to users' status updates, notes, and links. Now, Facebook is allowing bloggers and publishers to implement some of Facebook's core features outside of Facebook's own site. Facebook use to be a closed off silo, but this is changing rapidly right now and it will be interesting to see how Facebook's users will react to this.

Attacking Twitter?

As Nick O'Neill on the AllFacebook blog points out, this move can be seen as a direct attack against Twitter. The early success of Twitter, after all, was mostly based upon the availability of an API that allowed for the creation of a thriving ecosystem that went far beyond what Twitter's developers had originally envisioned.

Creating an Ecosystem

Looking at the announcement, Facebook clearly hopes that a similar ecosystem can develop around its new API. As an example, Facebook explains that it would now be very easy for a travel app to allow its users to create and share notes on Facebook with text, pictures, and videos.

Tearing Down the Wall

Facebook is slowly tearing down the wall around its silo and is starting to expose more of its data to the outside, which can only be a good thing. Just this week, Facebook also joined the OpenID Foundation. There are some legitimate questions about what this means for both OpenID and Facebook Connect, but it looks like Facebook is moving in the right direction.

Originally called "Blog Networks," the creators decided to change the application's name to "NetworkedBlogs" when they purchased the external, independent web site at networkedblogs.com where an online blog directory is maintained. The application itself has not changed - it has only grown and improved. The company recently ramped up their infrastructure to handle pulling a lot more feeds and released a feature to pull the blog feed directly to your profile on Facebook. They're also continuing to improve their feed reader by adding more social elements to it.

Although we saw the potential for a simple but powerful community-building app such as this back in June, there was no way to know for sure whether or not it would catch on with Facebook users whose app preferences tend to favor games and other time-wasting applications.

As it turns out, NetworkedBlogs is fairly popular...at least among blog applications.  They currently boast nearly 450,000 active users - that is, people who interact with the application by reading, commenting, adding a blog, etc. And the total number of installs sits at just over 700,000. That's huge when compared to the other blogging apps out there. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't have a category just for blogging apps, but a search for "blog," "blogs," and "blogging" shows that their nearest competitor hasn't even cracked 100K, and, in many cases, other apps haven't even gathered 5000 users. 

Additionally, bloggers who are using the NetworkedBlogs application are adding about 500 blogs per day, bringing the current total to 125,000 blogs available via this Facebook blog network.

What's New: A Network Widget for Your Blog (+Invites)

The latest big addition to the network is a new Network Widget which can be added to your blog's web site. When the widget is clicked, a Facebook Connect window pops up allowing your visitors the opportunity to follow your blog on Facebook. The widget is currently in beta, but the first 50 ReadWriteWeb users interested in trying it out can let us know in the comments. You can see the widget in action here on this blog (see the column on the right).

If there was any doubt of the power this platform provides, we've just witnessed an incredible - if not historic - example of what it can do. President Obama's inauguration is sure to knock Facebook Connect ahead of its main competitor in the realm of portable social identities, Google Friend Connect, whose current claim to fame is a blog widget that does little more than the falling-from-grace Yahoo's MyBlogLog widget does now, save for some over-hyped integration with social services like Twitter, Plaxo, and Orkut.

In the end, not only did Facebook Connect provide an interactive look into the thoughts and feelings of all those watching CNN's coverage via the web - it did so without crashing. According to the statistics, there were 200,000+ status updates, which equaled out to 3,000 people commenting on the Facebook/CNN feed per minute. Right before Obama spoke, that number grew to 8500. Additionally, Obama's Facebook Fan Page has more than 4 million fans and more than 500,000 wall posts. (We wonder if anyone on his staff will ever read all those!).

CNN didn't do too badly either. They broke their total daily streaming record, set earlier on Election Day, and delivered 5.3 million streams. Did you have trouble catching a stream? We didn't hear of any issues, but if you missed out, you can watch it again later today. CNN will replay the live video at 3 PM,  5 PM,  9 PM, and 12 midnight (EST) on cnn.com/video.

For more political coverage as it relates to the web, see also our post from last night 7 Online Things You Can Do to Help Obama Restore America.

Brightkite users can choose to have their Facebook status updated and/or publish their location, notes, and photos directly into their Facebook News Feed.

To turn this new feature on, do the following:

1. On Brightkite visit your Account Settings, click on the Sharing tab.
2. Authorize Facebook by clicking the link next to all 3 steps.
3. Choose your Facebook cross-posting options and click save.

Brightkite promises this is only the beginning and that's there's more in store in terms of Brightkite/Facebook integration. We imagine that means they'll soon allow us to bring our Facebook friend list into Brightkite and vice versa.

The power of this integration is precisely why Facebook Connect is rapidly being adopted by web sites across the internet. That, and the fact that regular internet users immediately understand what "Connect with Facebook" means. Unfortunately, "Login with your OpenID" still has them scratching their heads.

These appear to be buttons you can click on, but they are only there for displaying the information. In order to access the commenting and feedback features, you have to actually click the headline to read the article. That's a very minor complaint, though, as it's the commenting feature that really makes the News Mixer site shine.

Facebook Connect Makes the News Personal

Because of the site's integration with Facebook Connect, News Mixer is able to highlight the comments left by your Facebook friends. This brings their thoughts to your attention which in turn delivers a more personalized news experience. (Unfortunately, I couldn't test that aspect of the commenting feature since I don't know anyone in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.)

If you choose to participate, you can select from a drop-down box of responses which will preface your comment. By default, the site suggested "Sarah Thinks." (Obviously, your name would display in place of "Sarah.") Other options include "feels," "wonders," "agrees," "disagrees," "hates," and "loves." These choices are very similar to the options presented to you at the microblogging site Plurk, a Twitter-like site for sharing status updates with friends. On Plurk, you are also given various color-coded prompts to choose from when posting a note, the same as News Mixer.

Another plus to News Mixer's commenting feature is its transparent nature. Instead of allowing for the creation of fake names or internet handles for use on the site, Facebook authentication means that people's real identities are being displayed. No more comments left by internet trolls hiding behind their mask of anonymity!

Today's commenting systems are largely broken, as social media pundit Robert Scoble noted today on his blog. The main reason for his post was to share ideas about the state of commenting and interaction systems on the web. He wanted there to be a way that he, as the writer, could call attention to some comments as being more important than others. He had also said that he wished there was a way to see the social networks of the people commenting. As it turns out, News Mixer has introduced a great example of how that second request of his could work.

Newspapers: Steal These Ideas!

Although at the moment the News Mixer site appears somewhat plain and clunky, you can see the potential is in its framework, if not its design. In fact, the press release even notes that the New York Times interactive news technologies editor Aron Pilhofer encouraged media industry members to look at News Mixer, adding that there were "bits and pieces of it I'd like to steal right now."

We would encourage others in the industry to borrow some of News Mixer's ideas as well. It's not too late to save the daily paper - it just takes some fresh ideas. Like Rupert Murdoch recently said, the time for doom and gloom is over - the internet is really just a huge new market ready to be tapped. We agree. Now is the time for innovation because...well, it's either innovate or die. Hopefully most will choose the former.