Let’s face it. Signing up on yet another website is a drag. Another username. Perhaps another password if the password naming rules are inane. Then begins the process of building your social network from the ground up. Again. The repetitive nature of this process is — I think — becoming a significant barrier to attracting new users to social aspects of a web site.
Forthcoming releases from Google and FaceBook hope to change all this by allowing developers direct access to users’ pre-existing authentication tokens and social networks.
Last Friday, Facebook announced FaceBook Connect. This interface offers developers the means to add trusted authentication and access to a users’ Facebook friends to any third-party site. What’s more, Facebook uses real identities to identify users, a significant boon to those developing community annotation features. IMHO the ability to uniquely identify users and track changes will be critical to the success of such projects, but I’ll save my thoughts on that for another post.
Google recently announced Friend Connect. Although I haven’t been privileged enough to test this out yet, the description sounds promising.
Other options exist, too, for removing some of the tedium both for those implementing social features and for the throngs of users they will hopefully draw. OpenID, for example, makes it easy for developers to add authentication/authorization and gives users the option of a global username/password, but with all stripped down social features likely to be available through Google Friend Connect or FaceBook connect.
Still, these tools offer great potential for extending the benefits of the social web to chronically under-staffed genomic databases.
