MySpace's rumored adoption of Facebook Connect could be happening in the near future--as soon as early 2010, Inside Facebook reports.
MySpace and Facebook have historically been rivals, with Facebook having ousted MySpace from their spot as the top social network, but their relations have been of a friendlier nature as of late. It appears as though MySpace has effectively given up on winning the social-networking war and is instead focusing on its already strong entertainment business, which includes the market leader, MySpace Music.
The extent of MySpace's Facebook Connect integration isn't yet known, but it is expected initially to leverage MySpace's media content, like music. This news comes right on the heels of Yahoo announcing a massive Facebook Connect implementation across all of its sites. Facebook and Google are currently battling it out for the Web identity crown. With Yahoo and MySpace out of the race, 2010 should prove to be an interesting year as Facebook and Google both try to carve out pieces of the market.
The location-based social network, Brightkite, has just rolled out its Facebook Connect implementation. Linking your Brightkite account with your Facebook profile will allow your check-ins, notes, and photos to be automatically posted on Facebook as either status messages or news feed items. The feature is currently available in Account Settings on the Sharing tab of Brightkite.
Brightkite's implementation of Facebook Connect is pretty slick and hassle-free. They have done a nice job of making the whole process very straightforward for the user. This new integration could help to introduce Brightkite to a whole new audience on Facebook that they haven't been able to reach yet.
Given what we have seen Brightkite do in regards to using Facebook Connect to update your status message, I think that we are going to see a lot of websites jump on the same bandwagon. It wouldn't surprise me to see services such as Xbox Live, Netflix, Hulu, and TiVo add Facebook Connect implementations featuring live-updating status messages ("Harrison is watching No Country for Old Men on Netflix"). At some point, Facebook is going to have to build a better system on their side in order to let users deal with all of these services that they are going to be adding via Connect. If you have a dozen applications, all with permissions to update your status message and news feed frequently, things could get out of hand very quickly and end up clogging up feeds and profiles, pushing more relevant information out of view.
We are already starting to see some great implementations of Facebook Connect (like this one with Brightkite) and the platform is still very young. I'm excited to see what the developers will show us next.
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