Making Sense of ‘Connect’-ing

One of the biggest changes with digital media that’s emerging is the prevalence of third-party registration options now available for publishers. Today, there’s a post from 360i on Ad Age’s blog about this. While you should go there to read the whole thing, here’s the gist:

Google, Facebook and MySpace have all developed platforms where publishers can let visitors log in with an existing account from another service, rather than requiring visitors to register for that specific site. Publishers lose a bit of control; they won’t have access to emails and the full details they can collect when requiring visitors to register directly with them. What they gain instead is the potential for much richer and deeper engagement from a large population of visitors that might not have registered at all. They also gain opportunities to attract new visitors.

How should publishers choose among the current connect platforms — Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpaceID? The services are evolving quickly but [there] are three rules of thumb to consider.

Read the full post at Ad Age to check out those rules of thumb; you’ll also read more about this in upcoming 360i POVs.

For a great example of how these services work, try Facebook Connect on the new Citysearch beta site. Assuming you have a Facebook account (if not, may we ask why?), on the upper right you can click “sign in using Facebook” and click around from there. Try writing a review, for instance, and you’ll see an option to share this back on Facebook. You’ll also see if any of your friends are registered with Citysearch through Facebook, and then you’ll see their reviews.

There’s a lot more potential for how to integrate such services, and there are dozens of live examples now, so in 2009 it will be fun to push the envelope in finding new ways to use such platforms to increase engagement and drive traffic.