ReadWriteWeb

If I were truly mischief and wanted to game the system, I would have named this article, "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login, Part 2." If you're not familiar with the incident to which I'm referring: One of the most illustrative cases of the incomplete state of the Internet as an information system was in February 2010, when ReadWriteWeb itself happened to publish an article with "Facebook" and "login" in its headline. It soon found itself at or near the top of Google search results for the phrase "facebook login," with the result being that hundreds of Web users to this day happen upon this page when they're trying to reach Facebook itself.

The Web was not designed to require identity or authentication for data to be accessed. Up to now, most consumers have not considered this a problem - at least, not the ones who found themselves staring at ReadWriteWeb when they were expecting Farmville. This will change.

After fumbling through the first attempt at integration, Hulu and Facebook have finally come together to bring social connections to online television viewing. Hulu is serious about having users connect their Facebook profiles with their Hulu Plus accounts, offering a free month of Hulu Plus to users to hook up with Facebook Connect.

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.

It's done. The battle between Facebook and Myspace is finally over. Yesterday, the two companies made a joint announcement introducing "Mashup with Facebook", a feature that brings all of your Facebook "likes" and interests to Myspace by way of Facebook Connect.

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.

Facebook Connect, the company's fast-growing identity service, has been dramatically revamped for the iPhone and has apparently experienced some significant down-time as well. That's bad news for apps that depend on it for their users to identify themselves.

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.

Must include at least one number. Must be longer than six characters. Cannot have more than four sequential characters from your previous seven passwords. The rules for password creation vary wildly from site to site, an effort to protect users from those who would hack their identities.

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.

The experience of shopping and buying items has always been a social one, but online we largely browse and purchase items by ourselves while parked at of our computer monitors. The online shopping experience may soon get far more social as online retail behemoth Amazon has added connectivity to Facebook in order to provide product suggestions based on likes and favorites pulled from the social graph.

On the one hand, when we hear about Facebook making Facebook Connect an opt-out experience, we feel a little chill run through our bones and we want to commit Facebook suicide. And then again, every time we hear about another big player on the web implementing Facebook Connect, we smile, because for us and so many others, our Facebook friend list is our de facto representation of our real-life friends on the Web.

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.

Two years ago Danah Boyd's article "Viewing
American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace" mesmerized marketers and tech journalists. Facebook was described as "hegemonic" while MySpace was the haven of "subaltern" teens. Whether Boyd intended it or not, Facebook became characterized as the privileged space of college kids and MySpace was plagued with the perception of lowbrow tackiness. At the time it made sense that a site for the privileged had less traffic. After all, isn't privilege generally exclusive? According to a recent Hitwise blog post Facebook is not only beating MySpace's traffic, it's the second ranked site overall in the US behind Google.

Facebook used Nokia World, the mobile conference taking place now in Stuttgart Germany, to make a major announcement about the expansion of their Facebook Connect platform. According to Henri Moissinac, head of Facebook's mobile operations, the company is launching a new program called "Facebook Connect For Mobile Web." The Connect platform, which originally launched in 2008, is already available for traditional websites as well as Apple's iPhone. With this update, it can now exist for any mobile platform, too.

Streamy, which calls itself a "real-time news reading and sharing site," opened its doors today after an 18-month long private beta. Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts to Streamy, and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services. Streamy will also recommend interesting stories to you, and, thanks to its innovative user interface, sharing stories with your friends on the supported social media services is extremely easy.