Facebook Connect for WordPress

I was just reading on Nick O’Neil’s blog about the Facebook Connect for WordPress Plugin that is expected to be out anytime.  Apparently another company has already developed a similar product that was previewed at the Facebook Developers conference earlier this year but it apparently hasn’t made it’s way into beta format just yet. 

From what I have gathered the WordPress Facebook Plugin is actually being developed by Facebook themselves and has a target beta date of “sometime this fall”… In case you are wondering what this plugin is going to do exactly and why I am so excited about it, here’s a brief excerpt from Nick’s blog:

A few sources have alerted me to a project that Facebook has been working on: integrating Facebook Connect directly with WordPress.

For all you developers that also thought that building a Facebook Connect plugin would be brilliant idea, you might want to stop development. While the timetable for releasing this plugin isn’t clear, there’s a good chance that it will be released in the coming fall…

Another Blogger Eric Eldon also posted some thoughts on Venture Beat about the new Facebook Connect WordPress plugin, here’s a synopsis… (read his entire post here)

The WordPress plugin is probably intended in part as a sample for when Facebook launches Connect later this fall. Connect lets you share user information between the Facebook site and external sites; in fact, the company’s planning an event in Palo Alto tomorrow where it will help developers integrate Connect before the official launch.

The WordPress plugin would let a Facebook user sign in on the VentureBeat site, for example, then leave a comment that appears within their Facebook personal profile page and as an item on friend’s news feeds. The comment on VentureBeat currently includes the name of the user. In this version of the plugin, other Facebook information that’s available through Connect, like a user’s Facebook photo, isn’t available for display on the site.

Connect also lets site owners see relationships between users who visit sites. So if we (or the plugin) allowed that option, VentureBeat commenters could connect with each other — and we could connect with all of them.

But, many blogs don’t use any third-party commenting plugins because they don’t want to give away any data about their commenters — and that’s a problem with Connect in this case. O’Neill, for example, collects the emails of people who register in case he needs to contact them later. But the WordPress plugin doesn’t currently collect email addresses, nor does it share the addresses of Facebook users with the site owner.

Certainly, there is an opportunity here for Facebook to share more user data to other sites — especially those using Connect.

 

This screenshot is rumored to be a pretty accurate rendering of how exactly the plugin would work or look in the commenting section of a wordpress installation. 

Needless to say, being a fan of Facebook and WordPress both, I am waiting on this plugin anxiously.  As soon as it becomes available I will be sure to post information about it here on my blog so stay tuned…

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