Facebook Connect and Owning Reputation.
Anonymity is dying, and that’s probably a good thing in regards to online conversation and communication.
As more and more services switch to Facebook Connect as an authentication option, Facebook will become a very valuable arbiter of reputation. A service that will happily delete your profile if your name sounds too fake, Facebook has made no effort to hide the fact that it’s supposed to be about real people, and real lives. Facebook has also been making attempts to tie your actions to their social graph for a while - the first major attempt, with Beacon, scared the crap out of people. Facebook Connect is a better solution, because it’s not packaged as a way to attach your real world identity, and therefore reputation, to your actions. Connect is sold to users as a way of reducing the hassle of logging in to leave comments.
But it solves the reputation problem, which has been plaguing anyone trying to have important real world conversations online, for as long as people have been trying to have important real world conversations online.
Facebook ties your name, and a small (and optional) amount of biographical information to your friends, your actions in the Facebook ecosystem, and images and events. When it starts connecting that identity to all the comments you make online, blog conversations, arguments and opinions, it will be the best barometer available for reputation.
It’s entirely foreseeable that Facebook could functionally own individual reputation online. Which is why, from my point of view, any conversation about them being in competition with Twitter misses the point entirely.
