Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Sean Flannagan, the product manager at Etsy responsible for their recent Facebook Connect implementation. Numerous companies have been implementing the service and we’ve been keeping track of the experience for developers as well as marketers. Etsy recently launched their first integration with Facebook Connect and from the sounds of it, have a number of other exciting Facebook-enabled products on the way. Below is my interview with Sean Flannagan about the company’s experience with implementing Connect.
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Digg is one of the most significant implementations of Facebook Connect to date but not everything is rosy as Digg has violated Facebook’s terms in the process of rolling out their service. One month ago a developer in the Facebook developer forum began complaining that Digg was actively storing user information. One month later Matt Trainer who handles developer relations at Facebook posted that they’ve “followed up with Digg to make sure that no profile information is stored against Facebook policy.”
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Discovery is the latest company to launch a Facebook Connect enabled promotion that pulls in profile data into a custom generated video. This video is much more reminiscent of the Prototype game trailer that we previously wrote about. The promotion creatively depicts the viewers memories as they are being eaten by a shark. It also intelligently prompts a user to share the campaign after viewing the promotional video.
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This afternoon Facebook announced that Facebook Connect is now able to extend their service to 64 languages and locales. When developers implement social widgets, they will be able to decide which language they’d like to have as the default. Implementing Facebook Connect in another language is extremely easy, requiring the developer to only modify the include source of the Facebook Connect script.
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Today Yelp launched their implementation of Facebook Connect to enable users to share reviews with their friends on Facebook. After you post your review on Yelp, you are prompted to post it to your feed. That’s about the extent of the service but it’s definitely another large site to integrate with Connect. Aardvark, Etsy, oDesk, The Washington Post, and many more have also implemented Connect in recent weeks.
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Apparently Hulu launched their implementation of Facebook Connect early last month but few people actually noticed. The Connect implementation enables users to view what videos their friends are watching. One thing that doesn’t appear to be an integral part of the Connect support is the ability to publish stories about what videos you’ve watched to your feed. Hulu has been receiving a lot of traffic which will also help Facebook expand the reach of Connect.
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oDesk, the web-based tool for workteams, now supports Facebook Connect. This goes for both oDesk registered buyers and service providers, extending oDesk user capabilities to find the right person for the job within their social graph.

The three main aspects of oDesk’s Facebook Connect integration include the ability to share information including job openings, oDesk profile updates, and test results. As your oDesk profile acts as your online resume, an update to your profile could mean you have added more job experience or have received certification that adds a few letters after your name.
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Today the Washington Post announced the launch of their Facebook Connect support. The integration is relatively basic but lets users more effectively share content, at least that’s what the Washington Post communications team says. While I was able to log in after they gave me instructions how to, I wasn’t able to figure out how to share the content. Regardless of the existing Connect functionality, this is a relatively big fish for Facebook who just last week announced integration with YouTube.
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Want to get the most relevant news to you based on your network and not based on what some editor thought would be most interesting to you? DailyPerfect is a new site which crawls through your feed and picks out the most relevant news categories that it thinks you’d like to follow. It’s a pretty interesting model and so far it has been relatively effective at picking out the most relevant articles for me. The top articles for me have been related to Facebook and blogging which is pretty spot on.
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This has to be one of the best implementations of Facebook Connect that I’ve seen to date. Prototype, a soon to be released game on the XBox 360, uses Facebook Connect and the recently released Facebook Connect flash library to integrate profile data directly into the trailer. I’ve seen a number of interesting Facebook Connect implementations but this has to be the best one so far. I’ve taken the liberty of making a screen recording of the game trailer with my profile data integrated.
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