If you’ve ever spent a night at a local pub, you’ve probably heard of Golden Tee Golf, the arcade cabinet first released in 1989 and one of the first golf arcade games in existence.  Following up on their 2000 launch of Golden Tee Fore, where players could participate in tournaments from around the United States, developer Incredible Technologies released Golden Tee Live, which took the tournaments to a whole new level, with coordinated leaderboards and available prizes.  Recently, the games have introduced two social elements, Facebook Connect and Youtube Uploads.
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According to Techcrunch, Twitter is working on a new service which competes with Facebook Connect, however details about this supposed product are scarce. As any developer knows, Twitter was already an effective competitor to Facebook, supporting OAuth authentication and providing a robust API to third-party developers. However a new package is in the works and while Mike Arrington doesn’t have details, I would venture to guess that this means the creation of a JavaScript library and new widgets.
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In an interview with Xconomy, Mussie Shore, one of the developers behind Google Friend Connect, says that “8 million communities have formed with Friend Connect”. What do those communities consist of? The same widget which shows up in the sidebar of this site. The number is massive considering that Facebook Connect is now on “tens of thousands” of websites. I’ve written about the service extensively since it first launched and as of now, it’s being hailed as a great success.
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Can you build a community around a Facebook Public Profile, and will that help in your own blogging endeavors? Wibiya has created a service that is banking on the ability to do so, which has become an easier task given the continued updates to Fcebook’s platform, namely Facebook Connect.

Leveraging an existing fan base/community from Facebook in order to drive traffic and build up your own blog is a concept we support here at Social Times and AllFacebook, as it goes along with the marketing ideas put forth in some of our articles. But recent updates to Wibiya mean that the process of utilizing Facebook for your own purposes could be made that much easier.
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HerHotSpot launched late last year as an online destination site aimed at Gen Y women. With the site off to a great start, HerHotSpot is looking to take things to the next level with Facebook Connect integration. As HerHotSpot is a content network as well as a social network, creating a blend of forums, advise, Q&A and editorial content, I spoke with HerHotSpot co-founder and CEO Brette Borow about the site and how Facebook Connect integration can help this startup grow.
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LivingSocial, the social discovery tool for sharing your favorite media items, has just added a couple of new features that make its user experience a little better. For starters, LivingSocial has added TV to its growing categories for media sharing and recommendations, broadening your options further than just books (which LivingSocial started out with), dining, movies, music, beer and more.

Yes, LivingSocial had a beer category before it had a TV category, but it may have been worth the wait.
The use of a Hulu application allows you to view television episodes within a tiny pop-up, meaning you don’t have to navigate away from LivingSocial in order to see a particular episode.
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Just last month Brazil-based Power.com launched a social networking aggregator that brought together your activity from across Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5, to name a few. But just weeks after revealing its putlic beta, Power.com is being sued by none other than Facebook itself.

As a social networking aggregator Power.com doesn’t appear to be doing anything wrong, but the way in which it’s accessing Facebook user data is non-compliant with Facebook’s terms. According to The New York Times, Facebook has spent over a month in discussions with Power.com to try to reach an agreement in regards to accessing user data, but no agreement could be reached. As a result, Facebook has filed a complaint against Power.com in Unied Sates Disctrict Court in San Jose, California, for copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition and violation of the computer fraud and abuse act, among other charges.
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Drop.io has a new Firefox browser plugin that makes i even easier to share files with friends and, more specifically, with friends on Facebook. With the new plugin, you can create new drops from items you find from across the web.

It’s got a convenient drag’n'drop option for text, links, files and HTML that you’d like to share, as well as drag’n'drop tabs to the drop.io logo for creating a link to that particular tab in that drop. You can even continually drag’n'drop files to the same drop or different drops, even while other files are uploading. Drop.io has also added some keyboard shortcuts to make the sharing process even simpler: hit control + shift + D in order to create a drop.io link to the tab you’re currently viewing.
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When Google launched their Friend Connect service publicly last week, they one-upped Facebook by providing publishers with an easy to install widget on their site for instantly creating a community. While the features weren’t robust, it made it so that anybody could instantly implement the service on their site. In contrast, Facebook rolled out their service with the a few partners, many of which have still yet to go live.
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Tonight I’ve been seeing a lot of buzz about Friend Connect, Google’s open initiative to take of Facebook Connect. The service lets you login using your Google, Orkut, or Plaxo account. Both MySpace and Facebook decided to opt-out of integrating into the service but bloggers are embracing it at a rapid pace. Last night Google sent out a large number of invitations to bloggers to install their service.

The result is now a large number of blogs with Friend Connect directly integrated with their service. Surprisingly absent from all those sites? Facebook. Take a look at Twitter and you’ll see a surge in chatter about Friend Connect over the past few hours. I’ve had a few friends mention their new integration with Friend Connect. Facebook appears to still be rolling out the service on a one-at-a-time basis.
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