Blogs and Facebook Connect

Note - this blog is automatically imported into facebook, but unfortunately it loses some formatting in the process. Click here to visit the real thing.

One of the parts of starting a blog that excited me most was the ability to integrate it with Facebook Connect. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Facebook Connect is this thingee that links your actions across the web, and it's very new - though it was announced months ago, it only came out in December. 

You can check out FC in action over at TechCrunch. Click on any post and then scroll down to the commenting section. There's a button saying Facebook Connect. If you click on it, you can comment using your facebook identity, and your comment links to your profile (it doesn't bypass privacy settings, of course, so random blog readers can't just stalk your profile). Additionally, if you make a comment on TechCrunch through FC, that action will show up in your news feed. 

This is just one basic example of the service. I plan on writing a more detailed post about the merits of FC in the future. Suffice it to say I don't think it's something that's going away, and though many people I've talked to are resistant, I think it'll be mainstream within a year or 2. (Google and MySpace have launched competing products.)

The reason I think it's a great tool for blog owners such as myself is that it gives me an instant audience made up of people I know. Here's what I want FC to be able to do: when I write a blog entry, I want it to automatically show up as an item in my news feed. Now, I can (and do) do this a different way: I have my profile subscribed to the RSS feed of my blog, and it automatically imports blog entries as notes. But there are some drawbacks. First, as mentioned above, some formatting is lost. Second, and more importantly, the note and the blog entry are 2 separate entities, so when comments are made on one, they aren't synchronized to the other. 

In an ideal world, my news feed would produce something saying, for example "Dave wrote a new blog entry entitled The Mystery of Downsview Station" (yesterday's entry). Clicking on the link would take you to the actual blog, so I don't have 2 separate versions.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this is possible yet, at least not for the casual non-developer blogger. I spent a lot of time over the last couple days trying to figure out a WordPress plug-in that seemed to do the trick, and finally I discovered that the plug-in is for wordpress.org, not wordpress.com. There's a difference. Seriously. Wordpress.org is a method for publishing blogs from your desktop using an FTP client, and I don't want to have to deal with all that.

Facebook Connect is very new though, and I don't think it'll be long before blogger or wordpress or some other mainstream blog hosting site integrates FC the way I want it to.