So where is Twitter Connect?

The news today is full of Facebook Connect (here and here for eg) and even on the Economist.

The Economist as always does an excellent job of summarising the issues:

It is an ingenious stab at solving several nagging problems at once. Web surfers like to socialise while they browse the internet, but many prefer to do so only with their friends rather than with perfect strangers. Previously, they could post web links back to their social network by clicking on a button called “Share This” or something similar. With Facebook Connect, however, they can interact with their friends while on another site. On a news site, for example, they can see what their friends are reading, how they rated a story, and what comments they left.

Many website owners like this because it lowers the entry barrier to new visitors who may want to interact with the site—by commenting, for instance—but don’t like the hassle of registering. Better still, the website is granted access for one day to the visitor’s public information on Facebook, such as his tastes or travels, which means content and advertising can be targeted accordingly.

I.e. in exchange for making it easier for you to do what we want you to do anyway, we are going to scrape your user data and pimp unwanted stuff at you. Some bargain - but its the sort of aggregation play that only large walled gardens can afford in the early days - you don't payz your money and you don't getz the choice. Later, maybe, true Open systems will come.

But why use Facebook - its basically Yahoo 2.0, a Social Media Portal (complete with Groups, Ads, Widgets etc) with fairly clunky comms bolted on as an afterthought. Much more elegant would be to use something like Twitter (or any User ID that lets me access a sophisticated Comms system and my social connections). As Dave Winer notes:

We're now reaching the end of a cycle, we're seeing feature wars. That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated. Because I've been around this loop so many times. The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won't come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It's the last gasp of this generation of technology.

So, in the light of Next Generation thoughts, how about......:

Twitter Connect would be a much more elegant service simply because Twitter is better at doing that one thing - communicate with people on your social network. If you are interacting on/over/in etc other people's content, why bother with a portal?