walkthe.net and facebook

A few years ago the experience building about2findout.com learned me that most people don't like to create yet another account on yet another site. In this case, I'm one of most people. But alternatives like OpenID did not prove very successful either.

My new site, walkthe.net, is integrated with the Facebook Graph protocol and uses Facebook Social Plugins. It is Facebook's latest technology that allows a fairly easy (their words, not mine) integration with any web site. I'm curious to see the impact on the site. After all, Facebook is one of the world's biggest online communities. I do provide an alternative: people can login via their facebook account, or login as a guest (no tracking of your progress then).

You can see the social interaction and integration on the right side of every page, in what I call the 'social pane'. The comments on the walks, the recommended walks, the favorites (I Like) are all handled by Facebook plugins or buttons. When a walk is done, you can also recommend it to your friends.
 
There is good and bad in this approach.

Benefits:

• Facebook is one of the biggest out there, most people have an account
• On Facebook, people have a 'real' account, whereas on other sites you get the fluffybunny@hotmail or shavethepanda@gmail 'fake' identities.
• Facebook allows for a lot of integration in your site. Others, like Linked.In would be a nice alternative, but haven't opened up in the same degree.
• Integrating with Facebook enables social interactions, as I can get the friends list. For other networks, it would just be about authentication, and not about a social experience.

Drawbacks:

• Some people don't want a Facebook account because of the privacy reputation of that network. I can understand that. For my part, I do not store any information I get from Facebook, I only track the completed steps in walks against your facebook ID and remember who you recommended a walk to. So no privacy exploitation on my part in any case. All comments etc are directly handles by Facebook.
• The site is dependent on Facebook now. They do change their APIs once in a while, and if you don't update your site will be broken. Let's see what the future brings on that.
• Facebook has bugs too. For example, in my code I ask for the 'post to my profile' checkbox NOT to be activated by default on the comment box. But hey, it always is...  And there are other issues too. All in all, so far so good.