Facebook Connect is a service that allows users to login to any website that implements this technology using their Facebook credentials. Doing this, they can "bring" their connections virtually in any context, connect their actions with Facebook even if they're outside it and login without having to register to a new website.

It's one of the first technologies that makes the "Portable User" concept work effectively.

Earlier this week Facebook Connect reached 40 million accesses in one month in the US.

It quite an amazing result, and we can try to figure out the reasons behind this success:

• It's easy: users just need to type in their e-mail and password and they'll be connected to Facebook virtually in any websites. If they're already logged in Facebook they don't even need to type anything. Consider that a half of Facebook active users logs in daily, so they really know their credentials well and they don't need to create and remember new ones for a new website;
• It's trusted: Facebook has a great brand awareness. Feeling like you're logging to a Social Network you trust allows you not to worry about how their data will be used;
• It's quick: there's no need to type in any additional information;
• It's self-spreading: the connection with Facebook makes this possible: the user's friends are more likely to be involved in something they know their friend has done. And they know it from Facebook, from the news feed (e.g.)
• It's the first: technology that allows users to be "Portable" that has a wide adoption base: potentially the whole Facebook user database. Today no other "User Portability" technology can claim such a number of subscribed users.

These are the main reasons Facebook is succeeding so far.

It's the success of "User Portability" and not only of Facebook Connect.

The success is so strong that not only "Social" businesses are trying to implement it as quick as possible, but it's spreading also between other kinds of industries. This really caught my attention: federating user data will be a great way to get aggregated data and optimize services without having to attack the user's privacy. Businessweek published an interesting article about it a few days ago: "What the Smart Grid Can Learn From Facebook Connect - Federating energy-saving applications could provide more secure privacy for consumers than aggregating them in the data flood that impends". It's an interesting view on the power of "User Portability" even outside of what we usually call Social Media.

It no more just about Social "Media", the context we are dealing with is shifting to Social "Services" and "Products".

What's your take? Are you experiencing user portability in your everyday life?

Your feed reader brings you everyday fresh updates about what's happening in the social media space: "...[brand] just invented a new way to use MySpace to attract housewives between 35 and 44...", "...[brand] is launching a new minisite that perfectly integrates comments from a Facebook group promoting their product...", "...[Company] launches an iPhone application to show all of their branded stores on a map and vote your favorite one..."

I bet you often ask yourselves practical, result-related questions, like "What's the point of doing this?" and "How can this generate ROI?" or just "Will it work?". Ok, then: you're like me.

There's one thing you can do to get some of your answers: wait. And follow this easy steps to track social media initiatives.

1. Scan daily through the post headlines that your feed reader pulls to find interesting actions you are just curious about (AdAge Digital is surely a good starter, but you might want to add Adverblog to it, for instance);
2. Read the article and visit the digital places where the initiative is active;
3. Ask yourself questions related to the initiative success. Good starters are

• Who is this brand trying to talk to?
• How is the initiative going to be useful for the target?
• Why is this initiative interesting for people the brand wants to reach?
• How can this initiative be successful?
• Will the brand support it in long term or is just something momentary?
• Does or will this initiative integrate with the brand's overall brands social media strategy?

If you see some of this questions have no immediate answer, than it's time to keep track of the initiative;

Jump on the social media time machine

4. Starting from the post / article visit the place where the initiative is held: website, community, Facebook page, MySpace profile... Add this page to your del.icio.us profile (you might want to keep it private and you're saving it to del.icio.us for future reference), and (this is important) add to the bookmark as a description all the questions that have no answer;
5. Add a unique tag to this bookmark: something that will let you recognize it easily;
6. You'll never remember to look at how the initiative ended up unless you Create an event in your calendar. I suggest you put 3 alerts: 2 weeks from now; 1 month from now; and 3 months from now. Include in the event the direct link to your bookmark (http://del.icio.us/yourprofilename/tags/yourtag);
7. Follow your calendar and get back to your bookmark, adding the answers and updating it.

This sort of Social Media Time Machine will allow you to find which initiatives maintain their promises and how many don't.

I've been doing this for 3 months now and I found a lot of surprises.
This is my Social Media Machine, how's yours?
Do you have different methods?
How do you measure success of social initiatives through time?
But, most of all... Do you think we should share the results of tracking?

Why would you use the time machine?

It's about leveraging on one of the most powerful things you can do with social media: learning by doing. The plus here is: someone else does it, you learn. This exercise is good to think about what needles to look at in a project, to learn from what's wrong and what's fine and to adapt future actions to get the best out of this experience.

Photo credit: Polyman

Have you ever felt guilty about deleting a friend? Facebook, Friendster and MySpace deal with it in this hilarious Current TV SuperNews Episode.

Friendster character is terrific, and SuperNews is pure genious!

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the concept of portability of user experience. We see everyday more situations in which the (user) experience is a result of overlapping contexts, identity sharing and portable social connections. To mention a few, Skittles (watch David Armano's sociological viewpoint), the new Facebook restyling (which makes the interface a lot similar to Twitter) and the integration of Social Networks in on-line events.

I started thinking about what the basic ingredients for this situations are and I published a draft post that allowed me to share the first ideas and to get some good insight from people who commented on the blog or on Twitter. The feedbacks were really precious and allowed me to change the language I used to make it more clear and aligned to what's developing on-line.

The concept of Portable User refers to the possibility to live experience everywhere sharing the user's main assets. These assets can be stored in one place or in more place connected between them. The assets are:

• Identity: the user's profile, characteristics, socio-demographic data
• Social Graphs: the connection a single user has with others
• Content: the data related to the user. These can be gathered by observing on-line user's behavior or uploaded by the user

(With the aim of being as exhaustive as possible, do you think there are more elements that can be defined user assets?)

These three assets are shared accordingly to user's Sharing Settings: the collection of choices the user has done about sharing. What data will the user share? With whom? What content? In which situation?

The assets, declined through sharing settings, allow to define User Experience in a way that's distributed through many different contexts and situations: from on-line social shopping, to shared TV experience, to digital social events, to social enterprise activity to traditional networking.

This "Portable User" scenario is a simplification of what's starting to happen today and that could become a trend tomorrow: Social Media becomes "Like Air" (see Charlene Li presentation about it) and Social Networks exist not only as websites (Facebook.com, MySpace.com, bebo.com ...), but as real network that permeate each user social experience, anywhere it happens.

What's your take? Are you experiencing this paradigm in your digital everyday life?

This is a draft post, every suggestion about this topic is more than welcome!(Updated: 28.03.09: Here's the definitive post: The Portable User.

Here's a visualization for the possible evolution of portable social graphs. Users will manage their "Sharing Settings" to decide how to use their assets in various on-line experiences.

The assets are:

• Identity
• Connections
• Data

This is just a first reflection I want to share it with you before writing a full post about this topic.

First open questions:

• What technology is more likely to succeed for identity handling?
• Who will hold all the "data"? Where?
• Where and how will user manage his / her sharing choices?

A good source of inspiration is Charlene Li's work

Here's a fun Twitter video for the weekend.
What's Twitter? Meet the Twittersphere, the followers, the followed and the fail whale.

The video is from Current TV / Super News and it's titled "SuperNews! Twouble with Twitters"

Note: it seems like someone put a spell on this video:
Jeremiah Owyang posted it on his blog but it's currently not accessible.
It shows something like this

Current.com doesn't let me see this video and shows this

So here it is, for your entertainment. :)