Lesson for Open Source: Make it Look Good

Yesterday John McCrea posted on TechcrunchIT about his experience when attending the User Experience Summit for OpenID. Apparently a large portion of the event turned into a conversation about Facebook’s experience with developing Connect. One takeaway was that Facebook Connect is much further along then OpenID and any of the platforms providing a single login.

While OpenID is pretty well defined, all implementations of the service have been overly complex, in turn confusing users. On the other hand, Facebook Connect is extremely simple and intuitive for users. If you take a look at many of the open standards and the services that have been developed on them, it is a rare occasion when you see well designed implementation.

All too often we see implementations of new services, such as Google Friend Connect, but the service just doesn’t look good. Why on earth would someone want to integrate a service which looks like crap? They wouldn’t! If the open source alliance which is trying to develop better standards than Facebook can’t develop better looking services they are going to have some serious problems.

If they were to make Google Friend Connect look extremely clean, I think it could have a really good chance of succeeding. For the time being Facebook Connect has the best implementation and it would be great if other standards followed Facebook’s lead when it comes to building clean user interfaces. Have you seen any solid implementations of Google Friend Connect or MySpace Data Availability?