SADA Goes Social with Facebook

Become a fan of SADA Systems, Inc. through our new page on Facebook.

In a list of all the major success stories in technology for the past five years it would be a serious error to overlook or ignore the growth and influence of social networking. The term social networking generally refers to an online community of individual users who share common interests, activities, or hobbies. The concept of social networking, namely providing an online space where people could share information with each other on a variety of topics goes back to the beginning of the Internet. Early bulletin board services provided a space where users could publish posts on a favorite interest, activity, or hobby. Over time these spaces evolved and became more sophisticated, as the Internet ceased to be a largely text-driven series of online bulletin boards, and became a highly visual and interactive experience. Now the bulletin boards of twenty years ago have given way to the social network services of today. Services in this category include:

• LinkedIn.com
  
• MySpace.com
  
• Facebook.com
• Orkut.com
  

SADA recently joined the ranks of users who share photos, opinions, interests, and more with one another using the online service, Facebook. SADA chose Facebook for its clean look, ease of use, customization features, and popularity. Our page on Facebook provides a place where our clients can meet, learn about each other, even start a potentially beneficial and lucrative relationship. Facebook provides a number of small web-based applications that customize the user experience on our page. We have configured our Facebook page to show video content created by SADA (most recently this was a video of the SADA team singing happy birthday to one of our own). Our blog is automatically fed to the page on Facebook through RSS. We even have a few albums of photos for our clients to peruse, and get to know the team at SADA a little better.

What does this mean to you? More and more applications like Facebook, like Google Apps, like Mint are taking the place of applications that have traditionally been run from the desktop. Facebook allows those of you with whom we may work on a regular basis, but have never met in person, to put a face with a name in an email, or a voice on the other end of a teleconference. Facebook provides our clients, friends, and fans with a new and unique means of contacting SADA.

Identity Management Joins Web 2.0

Facebook and Google launch competing identity services


If you're like most moderate-to-heavy Internet users, you probably have an account with Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. You may also have a number of different online email accounts. Like most people you probably do some of your banking and shopping online. You may also be making use of online applications through service such as Google Apps or Zoho Office. All of these myriad services that are meant to make managing our lives and businesses more convenient have at least one thing in common; all of them require user authentication. This is usually managed with a username and password. Management of all of these user credentials can turn into an administrative nightmare for even the casual Internet user. Just trying to remember which password is associated with an account can be a real headache. In part to combat credential confusion Google and Facebook have launched competing projects that allow you to use one identity to log in to your account on any (participating) company's website.


Facebook's web 2.0 identity management product is called Facebook Connect, and went live on December 4th. The launch of Facebook Connect slightly edged out the launch of Google's competing product, Friend Connect by only a couple of hours. However, both services went live the same day, and they offer very similar benefits. Both services depend on web developers to add the web-based application to their website.

Facebook Connect offers the following advantages to companies or developers who implement Facebook's service on their websites:

• Trusted authentication: Users can connect their Facebook account to a participating company or website using their Facebook credentials. Authentication permissions are controlled by the user.
• Real identity: Facebook users represent themselves in the social network with their real names and real identities. With Facebook connect users connect their real identities to any participating website.
• Friend Linking: Quite possibly the biggest benefit to using Facebook Connect is their enormous social component. Websites that add Facebook Connect will tap into an enormous potential audience/market through the Facebook community.

Google Friend Connect differs from Facebook Connect in that it's not linking to any single identity or community. Google Friend Connect offers the following benefits to anyone who adds this service to their existing website:

• The websites to which Google Friend Connect may be added are not limited in any way. Google Friend Connect may be added to blogs, merchant sites, or mashups.


• Adding Google Friend Connect does not require any programming. Friend Connect can be added by downloading two files which are then added to your web server. After that you may add gadgets to your website easily by picking the one you want, and inserting the code through easy copy and paste.


• Google allows users to sign in using their credentials from an existing Google, Yahoo, or Open ID account.

What does this mean to you? Ultimately it could mean that you may only need one or two sets of credentials to do anything on the web. That depends heavily on the rate of adoption for these services. It also means that the web is going to 'go social' in a meaningful way. You may register with the website of a favorite restaurant using your Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect credentials only to find that a lot of your friends have likewise signed up to receive updates from the same restaurant.