Social Mode

All these publishers and platforms aren’t implementing FB Connect to help users, it’s to increase traffic.

Techcrunch asserts:

People may have IDs for the various blogging platforms or commenting systems, but most don’t identify with them. It is a necessary inconvenience. They identify with Facebook or their email because that is where they manage their personal and professional lives.

In addition to replicating the comments on your Facebook News feed, the JS-Kit implementation also supports embedding Facebook photos and YouTube videos directly into the comments. It makes commenting much more personal when you know your friends will see it in Facebook. It also has the potential to reduce the amount of comment trolling and general incivility that has taken over many blog comments (we hope).

I disagree with the notion here. Social networking, widgets, ShareThis, Buzz Up and all these single sign ons aren’t about personal identity, better comments, improving connectivity/making it personal or making it easier on the user.

No publisher would bother with FB Connect if it wasn’t going to increase activity.  Plain and simple.  As publisher you want to get into FB user base and you know that user base is active and going to dump this content everywhere.  Sure, eliminating the login is great, but really most these other services aren’t that challenging to a user who really wants to leave a comment.

Yes, it will increase traffic.  Facebook and Social network connectivity is the new SEO.

And just like SEO did for Google, so social connectivity will do for Facebook – FB is now the cornerstone of a whole lot of publishers traffic.

Anyhoo, nothing groundbreaking in the post.  Just wanted to point out something that might not be obvious about this land rush to see who can put Facebook Connect up first.