Facebook team yesterday announce the expanding of Facebook Connect to iPhone application platform . This integration will allows iPhone and iPod users to use their Facebook Id to authenticate themselves on any participating iPhone applications. They can also share the contents from the iPhone app with their friends via Facebook’s News Feed.
With this enhancement, Facebook Connect is a step ahead of Google Friend Connect, a Google service which provide similar function. Other comparison including Facebook Connect plugin for Wordpress, called Comments Box, which was released almost a month ago, while similar plugin for Google Friend Connect, is just released 2 days ago.
The race to get integrated with iPhone app is crucial for both services, considering the massive size of iPhone app store has, with over 27k applications and total of 500 millions download . By adding this service, iPhone app developers can take advantage of Facebook popularity to attract more users to download their application too.
While Facebook has nothing to worry about iPhone and its app store (it has no mobile service business), Google at the other hand has Android which trailing behind iPhone app. It has to consider every aspect before deciding to integrate Google Friend Connect with iPhone as well as Android.
One of our favorite game in iPhone, Tap Tap Revenge 2 is among the earliest application being integrated with Facebook Connect . Having plays this game even before we own an iPhone, we can’t be more thankfulness of the new release and its FB integration. If you’re one of the fan, don’t forget to download the latest version and integrated it with your Facebook.
InsideFacebook has listed more iPhone applications that has integration feature with Facebook Connect.
Comments Box integrate Facebook Connect into your blog
Comments Box is the the first social widget for Facebook Connect unveiled recently. The name is self explanatory, where it works by allowing Facebook user to leave comments using Facebook ID on any blog that integrate this widget onto their blog, without the need to key in name, password and URL.
The first Facebook Connect widget that I install on my previous theme doesn’t last long. But since this is come from Facebook, I still give it a try. To install it, make sure you follow the steps outlined here closely. It require little technical skills, but I can guarantee you that the instruction is pretty straight forward. There are whole lot of other resources in their repository if you can’t get it work.
I can get it works in less than 10 mins. This is how its looks like after I signed in to my Facebook account. When I post some comments, it will appear right at the bottom of the comment box.
If you thick on the ‘Post comment to my Facebook profile‘ check box, the comments will appear on your Facebook profile as below.
The downside.
All comments are kept in Facebook and not in your blog. If you run Wordpress comments oriented plugins such as top commentators, recent comments or most comments, comments won’t be included and counted. It is not even appears on comments admin menu.
However, comments can still be accessed using Facebook’s API (anyone know how?), but that require extra works. I’m still looking how to integrate this widget nicely, of if I should let it there.
How To: Create a Comments Box with Facebook Connect in 5 Minutes from Pete Bratach on Vimeo.