5 Comments »
When Facebook Connect launched three weeks ago many were awaiting the rapid spread of third-party support around the web. As of today, there are over 100,000 active users across Facebook Connect applications. While some of the users are overlapping, it’s a significant milestone for the service. So far there have been few large supporters, Joost being the largest so far. According to our statistics, Joost is about to surpass 13,000 Facebook Connect enabled subscribers. Vimeo is a distant second with around 6,000 Connect enabled subscribers but adoption at Vimeo doesn’t appear to be slowing.
Where are all the big publishers though? Hulu, Digg, Twitter, and many others pledged their support for Facebook Connect a while ago but so far none have launched the service. Our guess is that the companies are still fleshing out the bugs which are still clearly present. The launch of Facebook Connect on a large publisher could easily push the adoption well above 1 million users.
The beginning of Facebook Connect hasn’t been as quick as I personally would have expected but then again, it’s been a lot quicker than MySpace ID. Google Friend Connect appears to be gaining traction as well and holding up against Facebook Connect but as I’ve already said, the real battle is for large publishers. It appears that many are sitting on the sidelines until there is substantial data that indicates a significant benefit from Facebook Connect.
On our site we’ve most definitely seen an increase in activity as a result of Facebook Connect but that’s not surprising considering our site is all about Facebook. We will keep tracking the growth of Facebook Connect over the coming weeks and months to let you know what sort of growth the service is experiencing. Have you implemented Facebook Connect for your site yet? Do you plan on doing so?
Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect? which one you think is better…
I would love to have Facebook Connect on my blogs and websites but for the life of me cannot figure out how to do it
David
FBC forever.
are you still moderating/deleting comments (even though you’ve implemented Facebook Connect?)
Hey Nick, nice post. I work at OneRiot - a social search engine that helps you find the news and videos that people are talking about right now. We added Facebook Connect just before Xmas, allowing Facebook users to start conversations based on the search results that they find on OneRiot, and continue that conversation with their Facebook friends (a good example is here: http://www.oneriot.com/models-death-exposes-polygamy). It’s working out very, very nicely (tho’ I’ll spare you a “sell” here ;-). However, one of the interesting by-products that I wanted to call out is that our users are reporting that their own Facebook social graphs are expanding due to their use of Facebook Connect with OneRiot. What’s happening is that “user A” sees that “user B” has left an interesting comment on OneRiot, and then sends a friend request to “B” based on mutual interest in the topic. Very cool stuff. I would be very happy to talk more about this to you. All the best - and keep up the great work! Tobias