by Ethan Beard on Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 7:12am
Few things are better than connecting with friends and family, especially when you're far apart. Skype provides a great way to communicate with people no matter where they are. And starting today, it's also making it easier for you to connect with your Facebook friends.
When you install the new Skype version 5.0 for Windows and sign in with Facebook, you can easily call or SMS your friends. You also can check out your News Feed, update your status, and like and comment on posts directly within Skype.
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We're working with companies such as Skype to make it easy to find your friends anytime you want to connect. Try out the new Skype with your friends.
Ethan, director of Facebook Developer Network, just spoke with an old college friend, who lives in New York, on Skype.
by Ethan Beard on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 2:25pm
Over the past year, Facebook Connect has brought an end to lengthy registration processes on many websites, provided a new way to interact with your News Feed on sites like Yahoo!, MSN and iGoogle, and empowered you to take your Facebook identity and friends to technologies such as Nintendo DSi, Xbox and iPhone apps.
Today, we are celebrating the first anniversary of Facebook Connect from the LeWeb conference in France. Facebook Connect is now available on more than 80,000 websites, and more than 60 million people are using the service to... connect with their friends everywhere.
To start using Facebook Connect yourself, simply click the blue "Facebook Connect" button when you see it on websites or devices. Rather than entering registration information again, you'll instead connect your Facebook account to the other website or service and it will recognize your real identity, current profile picture and friends. From there, you can start commenting on blogs, interacting with Facebook friends and sharing content with all of your friends back on Facebook.
Facebook was developed with the idea that friends make every experience better, and with Facebook Connect that same concept is extended off of Facebook so that you can view your News Feed and updates where and when you want. With just a few clicks on an external website, your Facebook content, privacy settings and friends follow you to make your experience on that website more social and meaningful. For example, you can sign into the Huffington Post with your Facebook account, view recent news read by your friends and share news back to Facebook.
When websites add your friends to the experience, everyday activities are enhanced. For example, you can see the latest restaurants your friends reviewed on Citysearch or on the go with the Urbanspoon iPhone app. You can shop with your friends on Etsy, and watch TV with your favorite people wherever they are, on sites like NBC.com, ABC.com and CBS.com.
You can see more examples of websites with Facebook Connect here:
Facebook Connect is opening the door for communication and cross-platform interaction that hasn't been available before, but we're only at the beginning. You can now start a game, like Scrabble, with your mom from home on your computer and continue that same game later in the day from your iPhone. You can also connect and share with your Facebook friends in your living room from your TV on Xbox or via Boxee. Soon, connected experiences will extend to even more platforms, all with Facebook as the underlying technology.
We can't wait to see where Facebook Connect goes next.
Ethan, director of the Facebook Developer Network, is using Facebook Connect on his iPhone to find Paris restaurant recommendations from friends while attending LeWeb.
