Facebook’s Mantra: Use Facebook Connect or Don’t Connect at All
Want access to Facebook’s user base, which has now cracked 150 million? Then you’re going to need to play by Facebook’s rules.
Last week Mark Zuckberg’s company sued Power.com, a social network aggregator, because the company allowed Facebook users to plug into the site without actually visiting Facebook itself. Today, instant-messaging aggregator Meebo is unplugging itself from Facebook.
No idea if legal threats were brought up in this case, but the parallel seems pretty clear: Facebook will offer outside sites access to its user base, but only on its own terms.
In both cases, Facebook wanted the would-be partner sites to use its recently launched Facebook Connect service. Last week, Power.com founder Steve Vacahni told me that he and Facebook had “resolved” their issues, and that Facebook’s lawyers had told him the suit would be dropped shortly. But as far as I know Facebook has yet to withdraw its complaint.
Which has probably served as an effective warning for Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg, who sent out this memo to his users tonight:
Hi Meebo,
Got some bad news.
As a bunch of you already know (because you’ve been using it), we recently added Facebook Chat into Meebo.
We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they’d like us to connect to their network in a different way. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we said ‘okay.’
However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo ‘really, really soon.’
Work began this week, so stay tuned. We expect some all nighters on both sides!
Seth
P.S. Meebo grew in December. We reached close to 45 million people, a new record, including 2.5 million via Meebo Community IM. So it’s not all bad news… :)”
Update — here’s comment from Facebook:
We are excited to be working with Meebo to implement Facebook Chat using Facebook Connect. Their current integration was launched without meeting the policies we have in place to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained when they interact with their Facebook friends around the Web.
We announced our plans to open Facebook Chat to third-party Websites in 2008 and are working closely with Meebo to create a great experience for Facebook users that use their service.
Comments
Hail to the Thieves
So interesting that a short time ago Microsoft (A closed source company) wanted to push forward a standard (Passport) that would have given users the ability to have one log in that worked for many sites. At the time many in the tech and development community saw this as just another Microsoft Land Grab for our Identity and our Content.
Many people saw Passport as a Microsoft effort to finally gain control of the internet by becoming the standard for digital identity.
Today we have no less than 3 closed source companies in a race to become the “Standard” for holding our Identity and therefore having access to the content that we read and the content that we creates.
All of this at a time when there are many Open Source standards that could be used (Openid is just one that comes to mind) that if properly deployed would do the right thing by putting the user/member in charge of their log in as well as their relationships across many sites.
Have we forgotten the lesson of the not so distance past ?
Why do we not see a problem with the big 3 trying to become the proprietary standard in this very important area ?
Why do developers especially Open Source developers continue to build and extend applications for closed source companies that under mind open source standards and ideals ?
Why do users continue to view giving control of their identity and content to these companies as a win, when in fact the win is clearly on the side of the company that you have allowed to take control of your identity and to generate value and revenue from your content. In return for our compliance we do not even have a right to take our identity and our content where we want.
At adelph.us we believe in members freedom to control their accounts, and their content. Unlike Facebook we also believe that any revenue model should always put the members in the equation first. We believe in the Open Source community and ideals. We know we are not the smartest guys in the room and trust our community of members and developers.
Break the chains of the old web 2.0 share cropping model. Do not give your content or your software development work to closed source old world companies they only seek to profit from your identity,relationships, content,or code
Posted by William Dyson at January 9th, 2009 at 7:28 amthe best way to do identity is open source where no commercial company controls the login
unfortunately, there’s little “incentive” for anyone to develop
the model has to be more like apache and linux…universal open id login…
Posted by Sam Harrison at January 17th, 2009 at 10:41 am