Image by Abdallah ♫ via FlickrI don’t understand how Facebook’s new Friend Connect is substantively different from their pre-platform API functionality. External Web sites already have the ability to allow users to sign in to Facebook and retrieve their friends and profile from an external site. Friend connect just appears to be some better UI controls for doing this withouth having to jump off to Facebook and approve the 3rd party app. What am I missing?
One advantage Facebook Friend Connect has over Google Friend Connect (love that they use the same product name) is that Facebook accounts generally are *real* people. Whereas MySpace accounts are often fake. Facebook polices this, MySpace does not. So, when picking one or the other – I’d say this is an advantage for Facebook.