LivingSocial.com, a social networking tool which allows users to share
and recommend their favorite things such as books, beer, and movies
with one another, Wednesday announced a Facebook Connect integration with its services.
Washington D.C. based LivingSocial, claims to have 7
million users already. Back in July of 2008, LivingSocial raised $5
Million in funding from Grotech Ventures.
Now with this integration, one would assume that you could log into LivingSocial simply by logging in
with your Facebook account. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. For
every element of LivingSocial – books, albums, movies, restaurants,
games, beer, tvshows, slopes, and iPhone – users must grant access to
Facebook.
This slows down the users experience requiring them to click
‘Allow’ each time they want to access a different area of LivingSocial.
On top of that, LivingSocial overly takes advantage of Connect’s marketing tools and ask you each time if
you want to send a request to your friends who aren’t using
LivingSocial yet.
Facebook Connect, which was launched in December of 2008, is quickly
becoming a popular integration for many sites across the web. It
allows users to log into participating sites with their Facebook
accounts, and is attempting to become the digital identification
standard amongst social sites across the Web.
This is all well and good. Facebook connect’s concept is great! But only when it’s not taken overly out of control as you can see from the screen shots above.
