Legal Research

Facebook Says, “Only Connect.”

Two articles today about Facebook’s upcoming Connect service, which will allow you to sign in to Web sites using your Facebook credentials.  They’re being very cautious with the rollout of Connect — after all, it was only a year ago that they ticked everybody off with Beacon.

I’ll leave it up to you to read about the details of Connect.  However, a comment by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch resonated with me:

“These services make users begin to think about their identity in terms of their MySpace profile, or Facebook login as they use it to sign into their favorite services.  That makes it even more likely the users will maintain their profiles on those services, add friends, etc.”

This is so true, as I’m learning over and over.  Just yesterday, for example, I asked someone at church if he’d gotten an email I sent him several days before.  “Oh, I’m done with email now,” he replied.  “It seems like it’s all just spam and online bills.  I only talk to people through Facebook.”

Young people — again with the generational thing! — are changing the rules of communication.  Besides keeping up with each other via Facebook, they’re ditching their landlines (scroll down to the article beginning with “Snip”) and texting more than calling.

[Sigh]  It wasn’t very long ago that simply having an email address made you a digerati.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on December 01, 2008 (boomark / email).