Integration Of Other Social Networking Services

A recent comment brought up the possibility of integrating other social networks into my service, lowering the entry barrier for new users, and allowing faster adoption and growth. Integration of a widely used network like Facebook would certainly be beneficial, and would allow for a wider audience to adopt this service.

This could also work the other way around, developing this service as an application within Facebook, allowing users to use already existing accounts and information and simply add to them. There are benefits and costs to both ways of handling integration of several networks into this service, or making this networking subservient to other, larger entities. An application based in Facebook could make use of architecture already laid in place by their developers, and could even work to ease integration with other services. However, I would lose the ease and ability to create some of my own routines for databasing, as well as creating my own user interface. It could also affect performance of features available in my service. Striking out on my own would certainly raise the entry barrier, limiting the spread of the network. Developing all of my own elements could also lead to potentially disastrous results: a GUI that is not up to par, or applications that do not function well.

Overall, I do not think there’s a clear cut answer as to how to implement integration between services, but one thing is clear: it’s essential that it happens.