I have had better days. I woke up to the sound of a hailstorm beating my bedroom window to pulp. I saw weather gods in passive aggressive mood and pelt San Francisco with sleet right at the time I go for my early morning walk. And if that was not enough, I had emails from three friends letting me know that my Facebook account had been hacked and hijacked. I emailed Facebook support, who quickly killed the account after confirming it was really me who was requesting the account to be shut off. And then I emailed their PR to see if more folks were hacked too. After all, if that was the case, it would be a story.
Nope, it was just me who was on the receiving end of the machinations of someone who clearly doesn’t like me — this person emailed TechCrunch Tips, who kindly let me know what had happened.
So much drama! It should have made me very angry — but it didn’t. I was embarrassed because a lot of friends, family and colleagues who make up my Facebook network were now exposed to an impostor. The breach of my account made me take stock of my Facebook usage. It is a lot less than it used to be. And almost always, it is inside the Facebook mobile apps — whether on Blackberry, Android or iPhone.
I scan through the photos of my friends, catch on updates about their babies, their relationship (or lack there off) statuses and most importantly, birthday dates. I rarely do updates or share links, though I do message people. And I can do these easily and quickly on the mobile apps, thanks to the use of notifications (on my iPhone).
But almost half a day without Facebook has caused an unusual pain — it has made me unable to log into several of the services that use Facebook Connect as a log-in mechanism — like the Bejeweled Blitz and Words Free — two games I absolutely love. Ironically, it was me living inside the future I had envisioned myself.
About two-and-half-years ago, I had pointed out that Facebook Connect was the single biggest move made by Facebook and it was one of the reasons the company would eventually be a winner. It’s essentially a system that enables application and web developers to allow web surfers to sign in to their services using their Facebook identities. Here is what I wrote then:
In addition to offering a simple authentication method, FC allows granular social interactions to be embedded in non-Facebook services. If Facebook can work with its partners to build interesting use-case scenarios that go beyond simple sign-on, it is quite feasible that Facebook can out-execute Google, MySpace and everyone else with its ID ambitions. Why? Because this is their one chance of building a monetization engine.
As a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but ultimately be useful. As one Facebook engineer put it to me today, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be so sweet.”
Sweet, or sad. Eighteen hours after no Facebook, I know one thing is for sure — I don’t have access to my favorite casual games to make me feel better.
