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On Thursday, during the second annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco, social networking mega-website Facebook presented its new design and also described the upcoming Facebook Connect service, which will enable members to make use of their profiles on other websites as well.
The way the service will work goes like this: the user’s Facebook profile and log-in information will serve as a web "passport," thus granting the user access to any of the partner websites. Up to this point, 24 sites have declared their support for Facebook’s project: Digg, CBS, Citysearch, CNET, CollegeHumor, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Disney-ABC TV, Evite, Flock, Hulu, Seesmic, Six Apart, Socialthing, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo and Xobni.
The idea is similar to that put into practice by Microsoft, when it tried to take its Hotmail service to the next level. However, Microsoft’s password plan came to an abrupt end because of serious user security and privacy issues brough about by third-party sites.
Facebook’s story began back in 2004, when a website for Harvard University students was created. Since then, it has managed to bring together more than 90 million members, thus going past rival MySpace and becoming the biggest social network in the world.
Some 400,000 developers have put together programs for it and, as Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, in time, the movement will slowly but constantly turn from the social network and its platform to the applications others have built. The continuous flow of independently built programs has also brought along some problems. According to company officials, over the last twelve months, more than 1,000 applications were shut down due to privacy violations.
The main issue with these new applications is that they disturb the user’s online session by throwing at him countless requests. For discouraging this, only the applications which provide "meaningful, trustworthy and well-designed user experiences" are to receive a Great Apps label. Facebook Connect will officially be launched in September; however, the CEO already named iLike and Causes as the first applications to wear the Great Apps brand.
Mark Zuckerberg went on to say that his website’s mission is to empower people to share information so that the world may become more "open and connected."
At the end of last week, Facebook accused studiVZ, a Germany-based social networking website, of having copied its interface. According to Mark Howitson, deputy general counsel at Facebook, Facebook’s success is due to the "unique look and feel of both the site and user interface." He went on to say that studiVZ’s lack of originality came as a great disappointment.
However, Facebook did have some copyright infringement problems of its own as well; ealier this year, ConnectU pressed charges against Facebook, saying that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had stolen its ideas.
It seems related information keeps being brought up; some say that, with the redesign presented at the F8 conference, Facebook has borrowed a fair number of ideas from the social networking aggregator FriendFeed. So far, no legal action has been started but it remains to be seen whether or not FriendFeed people are comfortable with Facebook’s new look.
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