Ajaxular - All Things AJAX

You may have been reading a lot about Google Friend Connect, but aren't clear exactly how it works. Well, over at the Google Friend Connect blog they have explained exactly how it works.

Below is an excerpt from the post.

We figured you might be tracking the conversations about Google Friend Connect and Facebook. We want to help you understand a bit more about how it works on the Friend Connect side with respect to users' information.

People find the relationships they've built on social networks really valuable, and they want the option of bringing those friends with them elsewhere on the web. Google Friend Connect is designed to keep users fully in control of their information at all times. Users choose what social networks to link to their Friend Connect account. (They can just as easily unlink them.) We never handle passwords from other sites, we never store social graph data from other sites, and we never pass users' social network IDs to Friend Connected sites or applications.

The only user information that we pass from a social networking site to third-party applications is the user's public photo, and even that is under user control.

That's the high-level view. But what about the details? Here is more information on exactly how Friend Connect interacts with third-party social networks and applications.

1. Google Friend Connect puts users in control over whether they're connected to their data on Facebook.
2. Google Friend Connect only reads a small amount of user data from Facebook, and does so using Facebook's public APIs. We read the Facebook numeric id, friendly name, and public photo URLs of the user and their friends. We read no other information.
3. The only user information that we pass from Facebook to third-party applications is the URL of the user's public photo.
4. Google Friend Connect does not permanently store any user data retrieved from Facebook.

You can read the full post here.

This is very useful information as I know that I was about confused as to exactly how it worked when I first heard of it.

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