Facebook - the battle is lost

sicinius

Joined: 2009-04-24
Posts: 4
Posted: Wed, 2009-07-01 09:01

The Facebook login has become the de facto door to Internet.

I wonder how many other people out there have Gallery2 sites like mine. It's a big sporting photo database attached to a club website, from which, every week, the best pictures are lifted into a variety of Facebook accounts where they are discussed and commented on. The sport is cricket, a highly technical sport like baseball and some of the comments on shots played by juniors made by coaches and senior players are actually very helpful.

The point is that I want all this stuff on our site, where it can hang around and site members who aren't on Facebook (about 70%) can see them. We need the site for all the things you can't do on Facebook, especially event planning, match reports and so on. And a club in the next village was kicked out of the League for harmful comments on its Facebook wall last week.

But people log in to Facebook every day. Even users who have set up Joomla and Gallery2 accounts only log in to the main club site one in every 5 visits.

It seems to me that the most important thing for the future of programmes like gallery2 is a bridge (that works and is supported) which allows the use of the Facebook login and a shares the comment system so that the photo remains in the local gallery with the Facebook comments, from all the accounts it has been copied to displayed below it.

Otherwise we'll just be running a storehouse for Facebook accounts.

As a club, if we can't beat them, we'll be forced to join them and shift all the photo content over to Facebook and try and get some sort of control on there. That would be a big step downhill.
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sr-red

Joined: 2009-08-11
Posts: 1
Posted: Tue, 2009-08-11 06:45

Maybe a better way to think about it Grasshopper is "Choose your battle".

Is Facebook a battle lost or a massive opportunity - start looking at mashing up your content and don't necessarily stop at Facebook but also look at MySpace and other avenues especially mobile. Obviously T&C remain and your brand strategy has to work in the mashed up world, but its definitely all to play for.
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dgtlrift

Joined: 2009-09-08
Posts: 1
Posted: Tue, 2009-09-08 12:05
sicinius wrote:
The Facebook login has become the de facto door to Internet.

As a club, if we can't beat them, we'll be forced to join them and shift all the photo content over to Facebook and try and get some sort of control on there. That would be a big step downhill.

I agree it has become the de facto standard, but that is because of the huge number of FB users forcing it as the normal and seamless login that FB has provided, making it easy for their users to take advantage of. It would be advantageous to take advantage of such a system, but their are users who will never have FB accounts - simply because they don't like their TOS or having this entity hold their information. That's where Open-Stack rolls up. Still in it's infant stage, it should have the ability to decentralize (from FB) user authentication through the use of OpenAuth, OpenID, and other core technologies. I believe the biggest stumbling block is the autodiscovery of authentication providers. See http://thesocialweb.tv/ and http://en.wordpress.com/tag/openstack/ for more info.

Problem I see with OpenSocial (compared to FB auth) is that there is yet to be published api code for easy integration with existing web systems (like gallery) - I attribute this to some current design stumbling blocks with autodiscovery.
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