the tindog coffeehouse

Facebook is rolling out its Facebook Connect program, partnering with sites such as Digg, Hulu, and StumbleUpon to give Facebook users an easier way to log into those sites. Now, instead of having a Facebook logon, Digg logon, Hulu logon, etc., you can simply use your Facebook information to log in.

The service is similar to the OpenID standard, but with one big caveat: anything you do on the partner sites can and will be tracked by Facebook and can even be published to your news feed.

And that’s a good thing? According to some tech blogs, yes.

From Wired:

Such a system is sure to be welcomed by the web’s most social users, many of whom are sick of having to create a unique profile on every site where they want to participate. With Facebook Connect, you carry one set of keys that unlocks dozens of doors, and the stuff you do out there on the web gets fed back into the place you call home.

And from CNET (a partner in the service):

Users just want easy access to sites they like, and they want to trust that the sites they use won’t steal their identity or use it in ways that are damaging to them.

That’s why it’s good to offer users more than one way to access a Web service. It’s great if users can get into CNET services the old-fashioned way, with a CNET ID and password. But if we make it easy for Facebook users to come inside, that’s great, too. How about OpenID? Sure, why not?

So it’s all about convenience for the user? Hardly. As CNET goes on to concede:

The downside, of course, is that we no longer “own” these users. If Facebook wants to turn off CNET, they can do it. Facebook also now gets monetizable information about the Facebook-registered CNET users. Not necessarily what the users do on CNET, but what they do elsewhere–valuable behavior data. The convenience of using Facebook log-ins has a price for both CNET and users: Facebook knows a lot more about you now.

Again, I’m not sure if that’s such a good thing. I would rather have multiple user names and passwords than know that Facebook is recording everything I do.

Besides, I thought that was Google’s job.