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Facebook connect offers a very real value. It allows third party web applications like Citysearch to interact with a users Facebook account. It means the user doesn’t have to create a Citysearch account to be a Citysearch user, and the user only needs to login to their Facebook account to use Citysearch functionality. Oauth and Open ID combined provide similar functionality in an open standards way, but they have some limitations that businesses should consider before jumping on the bandwagon.

Data portability with Facebook connect or OAuth doesn’t extend to third party applications. In the example above a third party Facebook connect developer that would like to access a Facebook users data on Citysearch doesn’t have many options. The current method would be to have the user first login to the Facebook Connect through the third party application then go through another set of prompts to authenticate the third party application to access their Citysearch data. While this isn’t the end of the world it does create numerous steps for the user, each of which creates complexity and limits adoption. In the OAuth world its called the four-legged scenario and to date there hasn’t been an user centric way to solve for it.

What would the ideal world look like? I think it would be great if Facebook could acts as a proxy for the many services that connect to it. For example MySpecialReviewApplication which mashes up my Facebook photos with my reviews from Citysearch and shares them with all with my friends on Twitter using TwitPics was able to simply call Facebook and Facebook could negotiate and manage service access. I only need to deal with one service to get access to the many different services available for the user. If the user needs to create accounts for those other services, let Facebook deal with that too. Open ID and OAuth don’t remedy this situation either.

As more and more services begin to be available, this problem with magnify itself. We need a standard that includes service discover and service management through a proxy. Preferably and open standard that plays well with Open ID and OAuth. Anyone know of a solution to this problem? Is there a remedy out there?

Tagged as Facebook, Socialmedia + Categorized as Data Portability, Social Media, Web Services