Social Colonization on the Web Strategy Blog with Facebook Connect

Thanks to Mitch, my web designer, we’ve added the ability for you to login using your Facebook account and leave comments with your verified ID.

This means in the comments you don’t have to fill out the usual “name, email, URL” in the comments (otherwise known as the irrelevant web form), and if you’re already logged into Facebook it’s two click connect: one to say you want to connect with FB, the second to confirm the action.

Once in a while, I get spam, off topic, or an anonymous nasty comment, and it manually requires me to remove it. In the future, I can rely on verified IDs which can reduce this. We can basically rely on the identify confirming systems that Facebook is working hard on, leveraging their hard work.

To be clear, this is not a complete example of social colonization, I should enable a feature that would let you quickly share your comment, or my blog post with your community with Facebook. Secondly, logins in the future won’t just be limited to Facebook, but any social network that you’re part of: Twitter, LinkedIn, Hyves, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft Live. Lastly, I don’t have any way of gleaning data (that I know of) from folks that are logged into my site with their FB identity, but it would be nice to get a report of who’s coming, or the type of people that are coming, and how often. Likely, a great deal of this metadata will be housed within Facebook.

I had a conversation with Bob Pearson yesterday, the former executive at Dell who ran the social program, we were talking about how social networks can become destination hubs, and how Facebook could eventually bypass Google for search. To me, the web as a destination is an old model, Facebook will be more powerful if it’s not a destination but a type of overlay across the entire web –including impacting search engine results on every search site.

We’re in this era of social colonization now, so if you’re a web strategist at a brand or agency, you should be experimenting to find out how these things work. I won’t say I have all the answers to how to best harness this era, but I’m going to experiment to find out and will share along the way.