Facebook Connect has seen a phenominal amount of success almost overnight, and while Myspace still sits around on their butts playing with Yahoo!, Facebook is literally taking the rug out from under their feet. Let us go over a couple services that implement Facebook Connect in unique and creative ways that add to the overall experience of the site using Facebook Connect and Facebook itself.
Lala
Lala is a music streaming service that has been getting a lot of attention as of late with it’s off the wall business model. With their latest update they have added a significant amount of improvements as well as subtle social features that allow you to follow, share and gift songs to your friends. Since social is nearly synanomous with Facebook it only makes sense that they implement Facebook Connect in their arsenal of social features.
While this service is still in beta it boasts some simple yet powerful sharing features. Upon activating Facebook Connect you have many options on how you would like to share your music through Facebook as shown to the left. Once you do one of the selected actions you have the option to publish this activity to your news feed. Once in your news feed you have a simple flash player that anyone can play. An example of this is shown here.
This feature is obviously still in its beta form. Sometimes Lala will not publish the correct song to your news feed or not bother to at all. Other times it will tell you it didn’t publish the song but in all actuality you did. Obviously these are expected flaws and is a work in progress but the ease of use when it does work really proves the power of Facebook Connect.
Meebo
Meebo is an excellent online instant messaging client that allows you to connect all your IM accounts under one Meebo ID. They support all major IM services and just recently started supporting Facebook. The first version was a hacked version and was later taken down; a request of Facebooks for security reasons. Meebo later brought back FB chat through means that Facebook approved of through Connect. This allowed seamless FB chat (it was a bit buggy before) and of course Meebo has bragging rights to being the first to support FB chat hacked and unhacked.
Other
Many other sites large and small implement Facebook Connect in unique ways such as Techcrunch’s implementing comments. What I have shown here are just a few examples of what Connect can do. Obviously Facebook Connect is taking the web by storm. How long will it be till nearly every site adopts it is not a matter of if but when and I for one am excited to see what comes out of it.
