Hulu users can create a subset of their Facebook friends as "Hulu friends." If you and I both connect Hulu to Facebook, we will each be able to see updates on what the other is watching, both on Facebook and on Hulu. This will not affect the rest of your Facebook friends' news streams if they are not conncted to Hulu. As we have seen with Facebook's partnership with Clicker and rumored deal with music-streaming service Spotify, the platform wants to make entertainment more social. Yet, privacy questions abound.

Hulu and Facebook tried to ramp up Connect integration at the beginning of July but it went horribly wrong. Users would connect Hulu with their Facebook only to find that the profile that showed up was someone else entirely. Hulu shut down Facebook Connect and required all users to login through Hulu.com.

In a blog post, Hulu claimed all responsibility for the malfunction. Even if the problem was not entirely Hulu's fault, any problem with Facebook Connect exposing personal details or logging in to the wrong accounts would be an extraordinary problem for Facebook and shake the confidence the company has built up with the Web.

There are a few interesting bits to Facebook's Hulu integration. Users can leave time-stamped comments in their feed that will generate a clip of what they were watching at that time. Say you are watching Battlestar Galactica - episode 1, season 2 - and want to leave a comment on the 15-minute mark of the show. Hulu will generate a clip from that moment and post it to your wall. Users' ratings, reviews, discussion forum posts and favorite shows can also be published to Facebook.

Yet, you may not always want to show what you are watching. In that case there are several options: do not connect your television watching habits to a social network, toggle privacy preferences in Hulu or do not comment on anything.

The goal for Facebook is to become the spot where users discuss what they are watching and listening to. Hulu's greatest asset is its long tail of content along with its posting shows 24 hours after they appear on television. What Hulu wants with Facebook is the ability to amplify that long tail and make older shows more valuable to the service.

Is a free month of Hulu Plus enough to make you trust the connection between Hulu and Facebook?

We can't help but wonder if this announcement marks the end of an era or the beginning of a new one for the once-dominant social network, and we're looking to you, our readers, to find out.

Now, with Myspace bowing down and accepting that Facebook is the de facto login of choice, we have to wonder if the site has a chance at attracting the users it has lost to the other side.

What do you think? Will the Facebook integration bring you back to Myspace? Or have you moved on, never to look back? Let us know in our poll and in the comments.

The new login interface no longer contains any of the previously displayed information about what Facebook Connect means, the button to opt-out of staying logged in, the link to the Terms of Service nor the button labeled "cancel" to back out of logging in. It also removed the word Connect altogether.
Facebook replied by email and we've updated the post below with their comment.

Photo from Punch Kick Interactive

Nevermind the Details - Here's Your Login

Dramatically simplifying the login interface is an interesting design decision and one that Facebook hasn't yet replied to our inquiry about. For all the trouble Facebook gets in concerning user data and identity, the company appears to have decided to just remove all complexity from what it presents to the users.

"Connect [Application Name] with Facebook to interact with your friends in this app and to share stories on Facebook," it used to say. Now it just says "Log in to use your Facebook account with [Application Name]."

Facebook Connect is complicated: the way it shares approved information from your account and your friends' accounts with 3rd party applications, then allows those applications (sometimes) to post links to the Newsfeeds of your friends is not intuitive for people most familiar with a simpler, broadcast-based media world. Passwords and logging in are familiar, though.

The new login screen is certainly much easier on the eyes and brain - but is it a good idea to further obfuscate everything the user is granting an app permission to do? It would be good to see one more link added to the interface: an option to view all the complicated details that were removed in this redesign, and more.

Down Time

Meanwhile, Connect itself has been down for at least some mobile apps for as long as 24 hours. That's no small matter for thousands of 3rd party mobile applications.

"Facebook Connect is becoming a defacto login/signup," Alex Iskold, CEO of entertainment check-in app GetGlue told us.

"There are big benefits in using it - familiarly and speed of sign-in. But the downside is that if there is a bug, all your applications and users are impacted and there is nothing you can do about it. Right now, GetGlue users are sending us complaints about not being able to login or sign-up on our iPhone and iPad apps and we are just sitting waiting for Facebook to fix this."

Some accounts on some apps appear unable to authenticate through the new interface. We were able to login through Facebook on Shazam and Foursquare, but not on Cinch. There are a number of bug reports that have been filed about this in the Facebook developers bug repository. Facebook has not yet responded to our request for comment.

Facebook's Malorie Lucich sent the following response:

Mobile applications integrated with Facebook only get data from users when they explicitly grant permission. We recently updated the Connect for Mobile dialog to make the initial login process simpler. If you have not previously authorized the application, you will see the permission dialog after logging in, and no data is shared until you do this.

Regarding the downtime, we were experiencing a small bug that is now fixed.

These protective measures don't go very far, according to the New York Times, because hackers can get ahold of passwords with software that remotely tracks keystrokes, or by tricking users into typing them in. The story touches on a range of issues around the problem, but neglects to mention the obvious: the march toward a centralized login for multiple sites.

It would also solve the problem of password-overload. Managing logins for all the Web sites that require registration is a pain, and any frequent Web user who says differently is either lying or has a photographic memory. Browsers have taken some of the pain away by remembering passwords for us, but clear your browser's history and suddenly you have to answer secret questions and email your username to yourself for umpteen different sites.

A handy chart to help you create secure passwords, from Microsoft.

One or more options for a universal login is inevitable and progress is well underway. More and more sites are supporting the easy-to-use Facebook Connect, which lets users register for a site with their Facebook profile instead of creating a site-specific username and password. As of last year, there were more than nine million websites using OpenID, the openly-developed standard that users can use to log in across multiple sites.

Standards like OpenID carry their own security problems (and other problems - see The Troubles With OpenID 2.0), the obvious being that a successful hacker can gain access to all the sites and services you use at once. But the convenience of a universal login is irresistible, especially for the myriad sites where there's no danger if your password is hacked, such as news sites. Users who try it won't want to go back - which is why it's important to talk about the security issues around these new protocols for users and the sites that implement them.

How do you manage your logins?

Suggestions can come from any of your Facebook friends regardless of whether they connect their accounts with Amazon. By connecting your account, you allow Amazon to scrape your friend's interests and favorites. You can then view suggested gift ideas based on this data to help you make a wiser purchase, but in many cases (at least as I try right now) profiles lack enough information to populate suggestions.

Amazon also will populate lists of items that are popular among all of your friends, as well as suggestions based on your own interests. I just so happen to keep an exhaustive list of favorites and interests on my Facebook profile, so the suggestions are pretty helpful for me. Looking through the suggested books and movies turns up some interesting results I might consider when I need something to read or watch.

The added service is currently in beta, but users can go to Amazon's Facebook setup page to connect their accounts and authorize the sharing of friend data. This is a big move for Amazon as they begin to leverage Facebook, which has scored another large victory in spreading its influence across the web. Now just imagine if iTunes had something like this.

YouTube this weekend announced that it would be stepping up its Facebook integration, allowing you to see what YouTube videos all of your friends are sharing on Facebook.

The blog also highlights "real-time sharing", saying that now, when you share YouTube videos on other social networks, it happens immediately and not 10 minutes later. We have to imagine that this has lowered the number of exasperated support requests from impatient users, as we've all come to expect things to happen instantaneously and not when the server feels like getting around to it.

As for sharing, users can automatically share videos they post on YouTube to Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. This new feature twists around the usual, making it possible for users to see what their friends are sharing on Facebook. In this case, it does not mean that they have to create the video for you to see it - if they share it, you can see that.

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.