Baking Life currently attracts 730,000 monthly average users, and PopCap, which is owned by Electronic Arts, says that just isn’t enough. “The Baking Life player numbers have dropped in such a way that Baking Life is no longer performing well enough to justify continued support. As such, we are reallocating resources to games that we are developing for future release.” In its heyday, Baking Life was apparently pulling in 6.7 million monthly users, a figure that would make most Facebook developers blush.

Baking Life’s Facebook page has now lit up with players angry at the decision. One post says, “Electronic Arts has really destroyed a lot of wonderful Facebook games. They also bought Playfish and now if a game doesn’t get so many people that play every month, they just shut it down in the same manner they are doing with Baking Life.”

Understandably, the players who spent real cash on Baking Life are perhaps most upset at the decision. “You have a lot of nerve, I had the whole bakery completely enlarged and decorated. And I had several hundred thousand dollars. I spent alot of money on that game and don’t appreciate your handling of it,” reads one comment on Baking Life’s Facebook page.

The official Baking Life forum has also been swamped with angry users, with one saying, “Seriously, I’m really hacked off. … I have spent an obscene amount of money on this game, using Facebook credits etc only to be told it is no longer going to be available after the 31st January.”

The Baking Life virtual currency, called Zip Cash, is unique to the game and is available to buy in bundles ranging from 25 (costing $4.90) to 925 (costing $149.90). Virtual items can then be bought using this Zip Cash, with a ‘Triple Batch Oven’ costing the equivalent of $7.20.

Now that the game is closing, this Zip Cash is essentially worthless, and the Baking Life Facebook page says, “We encourage you to spend your remaining Zip Cash before January 31st. All virtual currency (Zip Cash) and virtual items will be lost after January 31st.” It points out that, “Any remaining Zip Cash (even if it was purchased and unused) is not transferable between or among different games or applications and is not redeemable for any sum of money or other monetary value.”

Rubbing further salt into the wound, there is now a link to a survey on the Baking Life Facebook page, asking for help in developing new games. One reply to this states, “How dare you ask any of us who were dedicated to playing Baking Life to vote in a survey to launch a new game to replace it.”

A lot of Baking Life players have had their fingers burned by the decision to shut the game down, and many are saying they will avoid any EA or PopCap published Facebook games in the future.

Back in 1999, Microsoft took a first step towards creating a universal Web identity when it launched Microsoft Passport. While the product didn’t catch on in its original iteration, Passport helped bring a critical concept to life that would eventually change the internet: that identity would one day rule the Web. The next major development in online identity came when the OpenID standard emerged, offering the groundwork for a universal “single sign-on” for authentication across the Web.

The real explosion of online identity, however, didn’t happen until Facebook launched the now ubiquitous Facebook Connect API. Facebook Connect brought social identity to the mainstream by cracking the adoption code. Facebook Connect added real value to both its massive base of users (allowing easy sign-in and interaction with friends) and publishers (increased participation, engagement and page views). Today, dozens of online identity providers, from social networks to email services, have opened their platforms and followed in Facebook’s footsteps, and companies like mine are enabling social experiences by offering registration and login through these identity providers.

Thanks to the proliferation of these identity providers, we have come to a point that when visitors login to websites, they’re not just choosing to do so with an identity provider – they’re choosing a persona. This is a dramatic shift on the Web when we consider that just a few years ago there were no scaled identity providers. Personas exist naturally because the Web mirrors real life. In real life, in any given week I may go out with coworkers, family, conference attendees, basketball friends, or old college buddies and I’m sharing different parts of my life with all of them.

Those different personas exist online just as they do in my offline world. For example, when I log in with my LinkedIn identity on the Web, I’m showing that I want to share and interact with my professional persona. When I log in with Twitter, I’m trying to impress the people I want to know and want to be known by. Facebook (and soon, Google+) identity is perhaps the most intimate – when I use my Facebook identity on the Web, I’m choosing to let my real friends know about it.

Website visitors literally have multiple online personalities – a concept with major implications for online businesses, particularly content publishers, looking to add social functionality to their sites. And as social login becomes standard on the Web, some publishers are clearly cognizant of their users’ chameleon-like nature and some are surprisingly not. Take a look at The Huffington Post:

Notice how HuffPo implemented seven different login options for their users – some overtly social, some not. The wide range of login options allows visitors not only a choice of persona but also a choice of what type of personal information they give the publisher. For example, someone logging in with Facebook grants the publisher access to more personal profile information like interests and activities, while someone choosing to login with their LinkedIn ID grants access to more professional information like job title. The Huffington Post’s social login options make sense because the site offers content appealing to many different personas – business/tech news, sports, entertainment, etc.

Yet across the web, you can find examples of major sites focusing only on Facebook or Twitter. Take Yahoo News, for example, pictured below. While it has integration with Facebook and Google, shouldn’t the site at least offer login through Twitter? LinkedIn? In addition to that, the site brings you to an entirely new page offering nothing other than the login box and a gigantic display ad. Yahoo News covers a huge range of topics and for business users, so not offering LinkedIn and Twitter seems like a missed opportunity.

The Future of Identity on the Web
The beauty of mass-adoption technologies like Facebook Connect is that these tools have essentially brought identity to the rest of the Web. While Facebook will likely reign as the leading social network identity provider, I think we’ll continue seeing the other players take a significant piece of the social identity pie as Web users look to engage with specific content with specific personas. Content providers that understand the intricacies of Web identity have much to gain – and those businesses that fail to recognize the many faces of identity have a user-base to lose.

“We think the space we’re in, we’re just scratching the surface,” said founder and chief executive Larry Drebes (pictured) told VentureBeat in an interview.

Social logins are not only a way to streamline registration processes, but also an opportunity for websites to glean extra data about their users. Social logins are keys to an existing profile, which potentially provides age, sex, location, preferences and more. All of this data can be leveraged in marketing and advertising.

Janrain’s social login works as more than just a registration tool. The company also offers a suite of back-end services for harvesting and utilizing user data.

“Most of the web knows us with our front end, but we also have other products that actually store profiles and manage them.”

The suite begins with the social login feature  “Janrain Engage,” which also enables social sharing. If you’ve ever seen a dialog box like the one to the right, which asks you to log in through Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter or the like, you’ve probably used Janrain Engage.

“Janrain Capture” scrapes and stores profile data in the cloud and allows companies to share social profiles across select web properties and partner sites. “Janrain Federate” then enables single sign-on for all of those shared web properties. Dr. Pepper recently rolled “Janrain Capture” out across its properties.

Facebook Connect could be considered a competitor, but Drebes believes his company’s suite of products outruns the competition. “We certainly don’t walk up and down the halls and worry about Facebook Connect,” he said. In fact, the back-end products can be used in conjunction with companies who have already implemented Facebook Connect.

Surprisingly, given the amount of data it collects, Janrain isn’t focused on targeting advertisements. “We’re still in a space where knowing your user can help customize the experience,” Drebes said. According to Drebes, companies are mainly using Janrain to build richer interactions.

“At the end of the day advertising is a big part of the internet, but that’s not an area that we play in right now,” he said. “But I wouldn’t say that we’re totally outside of that space.”

Janrain will be using the funding to hire people across the board in addition to ramping up marketing efforts. For Drebes, however, the most exciting aspect of this round is the partnership with Emergence Capital Partners. “We’re absolutely thrilled,” Drebes said. “Emergence just concentrates on SaaS investments and that aligns with exactly what we’re doing.”

Drebes was connected to Emergence through a longstanding personal relationship with the venture firm’s founder Brian Jacobs, who is also joining Janrain’s board.

Janrain was founed in 2005 and serves clients like MTV, Intel, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Sears, and more. Funding to date totals $18.7 million from Emergence Capital Partners, Anthem Venture Partners, DFJ Frontier, RPM Ventures, Tim Draper, and founder Larry Drebes. The company currently has 60 employees.

Related articles

• Emergence Capital Partners raising $200M fund (venturebeat.com)
• MTV Networks Partners With Janrain to Enhance Engagement with Social Media Users Worldwide (prweb.com)
• Calling all Entrepreneurs! Get onstage at Splash, Sept. 29 (venturebeat.com)
• Facebook remains the most popular social login as mobile usage surges (thenextweb.com)

Yet, that’s exactly what happened when people tried to link their Hulu accounts with their Facebook profile via Facebook Connect. Connect is a service that lets Facebook users log into third-party services using their Facebook account information.

Hulu said shortly after launching its Facebook Connect feature Friday that it noticed a small number of users were seeing someone else’s account information upon logging in to the site. That means they saw someone else’s queue (playlist) of videos, subscriptions and friends. The company confirmed that 50 of its users were affected by this flaw, which could have exposed their profile data. Highly sensitive information such as account passwords or credit card numbers were not compromised as a result of the bug, the company said.

But the company’s statement conflicts with the experience documented by Audio Video Revolution’s Mike Flacy, who gained access to Hulu employee Thomas Moore’s account due to the privacy flaw.

After logging in to Moore’s account, Flacy writes:

…I was able to access his [Moore's] street address, financial information (last 4 digits of his CC with expiration date), device management, email address and password.  I know that Thomas has just finished watching episodes of Modern Family, Suits, Burn Notice and The Guild.  If I was a jerk, I could cancel his Hulu Plus account, turn off all his devices and change his email / password.  If I was a devious thief, I could slip my device onto his account and get some free Hulu Plus until he noticed. Thank goodness for Thomas, I’m not. 

As further proof of his experience, Flacy provided several screenshots of the privacy flaw in action within his post.

“We’re still drilling down on the precise nature of the issue, but we know that it was a coding and configuration error on Hulu’s side, and not the result of hacking, or other third-party actions, or a vulnerability in Facebook Connect,” wrote Hulu’s Vice President of Platform Technology Richard Tom on the company’s blog.

Tom said the company is being extra cautious going forward. All the integration of Facebook Connect on Hulu has been disabled, and all users are required to login directly to the site using their Hulu account information instead of a Facebook ID. Also, all privacy settings have been set to the maximum restrictive level by default for anyone who logged into a Hulu account using Facebook.

“Once we are certain that the issue has been fully addressed, we will re-launch our Facebook Connect program,” Tom said. “We apologize to any affected users, and we intend to do everything we can to make it right and avoid similar issues in the future.”

It’s a shame that Hulu ran into such a huge security compromising bug, because at least one of the new features enabled through Facebook Connect was exactly as the company described it: “first-of-its-kind…”

The feature allows Hulu users to comment on a specific moment within a video. Both the comment and the relevant portion of the video can be shared on your Facebook profile by clicking a button on the video player’s page. Other video services like Vimeo and YouTube have similar commenting features, but neither has done it quite like Hulu does with its social integration.

Hulu said it won’t roll out Facebook Connect integration to the site again until the company can ensure that breaches of privacy won’t occur in the future. But since that could take a while, I’ve embedded a screenshot of the new commenting feature below.

Via Gigaom

San Francisco-based LOLapps has launched its RavenwoodFair.com website, where users of its popular Facebook game can play. The new game website still taps a user’s friend list via Facebook Connect, but the game can now be played whether a user visits Facebook or not.

It’s similar to a move that Zynga, the largest social-games maker, pulled with its popular FarmVille game, introducing the FarmVille.com website. That launch occurred in the midst of tense negotiations over the social network’s plans to get a cut of virtual goods sold through games played on Facebook.

Arjun Sethi, chief executive of LOLapps, is much too diplomatic to say his company is diversifying away from Facebook. Rather, he says his company is embracing Facebook Connect, which connects your friend lists on Facebook with applications beyond the borders of Facebook’s own social network.

“We have always planned to add new platforms and this game has grown so fast that we have decided to accelerate our plan,” Sethi said.

Zynga has also had feuds with Facebook over the social network’s decision to make it more difficult for users to solicit friends to play their games through status updates and requests, which forced big game companies to pay for more advertising to spread their games.

Ravenwood Fair is a good candidate for LOLapps to use to move beyond Facebook because it’s a big hit. Developed by consultant John Romero, co-creator of Doom, the game has grown to more than 1.8 million monthly active users in just two weeks, according to AppData.

The average session time for the game is more than 20 minutes and as many as 12 percent of users are purchasing items in the game, Sethi said. Sethi believes that the number of users buying virtual goods is high because the game makes use of Facebook Credits, the new official virtual currency for the social network.

The interesting thing about launching the website with Facebook Connect is that the game allows players to log in into their own game — with all of its saved data — from anywhere. You can go to the Facebook site or you can go to the web site and still play the same game with your same saved data and character.

Things are going well now, but Ravenwood Fair was almost derailed. It was supposed to launch on Oct. 15, but Facebook pulled down all LOLapps games on that day and didn’t restore them until the evening of 17, citing only “violation of Facebook’s policies.” The Wall Street Journal reported that some games, including LOLapps titles, were wrongfully transmitting user data to third-party companies. Of those companies, LOLapps was one that was singled out and shut down. Sethi said LOLapps worked with Facebook to restore its games and will ensure it can protect users’ safety and abide by Facebook’s policies. By Tuesday, Oct. 19, LOLapps was able to launch Ravenwood Fair on Facebook.

At the time, Sethi didn’t comment on being in the penalty box with Facebook. But in a blog post, the company acknowledged that Facebook said that, “in most cases, developers did not intend to pass this (private user) information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work.” Upon learning of the problem, LOLapps “immediately dissolved” a relationship (presumably a business deal with RapLeaf, one of the marketing firms caught in the privacy mistake) and then brought itself back into compliance.

The whole incident showed everyone that LOLapps’ fate lay entirely in Facebook’s hands. When its games were taken down, LOLapps had no games available at all. Diversification was an obvious strategy to pursue.

Ravenwood Fair is part of LOLapps’ strategy to become a big player in social games and join the ranks of Zynga, EA-Playfish, Disney-Playdom, and CrowdStar. Those companies have been printing money by creating simple casual games that are free-to-play, where users can play the game for free and can pay real money for virtual goods.

AppData shows that LOLapps has more than 15 million monthly active users on Facebook. But LOLapps says Facebook does not include in those stats the company’s many users who have developed their own custom gift and quiz apps using LOLapps titles.

Group video calling is a feature the company slowly ramped up throughout Skype 5′s beta. It first offered the ability for five-person video chats in May. At the time I argued that group video chat would become the next killer webcam feature. In September, the company extended group video chat to support 10-person conversations. Eventually, Skype will charge for group video chats, but for now users can try out the service for free.

We reported at the end of September that Facebook and Skype were partnering up, and the official release of Skype 5 is the first time we get to see Facebook’s integration into the software. You can now log in with Facebook Connect in Skype to instant message, call, and text your Facebook friends. You can also view your Facebook News Feed from within Skype, post status messages, and synchronize your status messages with Skype’s “mood message.”

As I’ve argued previously, the partnership is a win for both companies: Facebook gets access to a robust voice and video calling platform, and Skype will see a massive surge in new users from Facebook’s 500 million users. Skype has 124 million people using its software once a month and 550 million registered users of its own. There will certainly be a great deal of overlap between existing Skype and Facebook users, but the integration will also lead many users to try out Skype who never saw a reason to in the past.

As expected, Skype 5 also introduces a more refined interface and better overall call quality. The new interface should make it more intuitive to use existing Skype features like screen sharing.

Skype plans to update its Mac client by the end of the year with group video calling, and I assume that it would roll out Facebook integration on that platform at the same time.

It’ll be interesting to see where the company goes from here. It is surely working on bringing video chat to its mobile clients eventually, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we heard a Google TV announcement from the company (“Back to the Future”-esque images of 10-person video chats in my living room come to mind). Skype already offers TV-based video calling on Samsung and Panasonic TVs.

The partnership will allow Facebook users to easily log into Skype using Facebook Connect and will give users the ability to text message, voice chat, and even video chat with their Facebook friends from within Skype. It’s expected to appear in Skype’s upcoming 5.0 version, which will emerge from beta testing in the next few weeks.

The deal is a win for both companies: Facebook gets access to a robust voice and video calling platform, and Skype will see a massive surge in new users from Facebook’s 500 million users. Skype has 124 million people using its software once a month and 550 million registered users of its own. There will certainly be a great deal of overlap between existing Skype and Facebook users, but the integration will also lead many users to try out Skype who never saw a reason to in the past.

There are still many questions about what this partnership means: Will Skype eventually bring in-browser voice and video chat to Facebook’s site? That’s definitely one advantage that a service like Gmail’s voice and video chat has. And what does the partnership mean for Skype and Facebook mobile apps?

As AllThingsDigital’s Kara Swisher mentions, the arrangement will help Facebook with its international presence since Skype is more popular among international users.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. The conference takes place on October 18th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click here.

But that didn’t stop Zuckerberg from crowing about 400 million users. That means that if you’re building a website, most of your users are probably Facebook users too, Zuckerberg said: “And if they’re not, they probably will be soon.”

He also highlighted how each new Facebook service gets off to faster and faster starts. Facebook Mobile hit the 100 million user mark after about three years, he said, faster than Facebook.com proper but slower than the more recently launched Facebook Connect. Connect integrates the social network with external websites and apps, and it only took 15 months to hit the 100 million user milestone. One example of its significance: 10 of the top 10 iPhone apps use Connect, Zuckerberg said.

It’s called Facebook Connect for Mobile Web, and, as with the iPhone version, it gives app developers an easier way to reach Facebooks’s users and their data.  Availability on Nintendo’s DSi came earlier this month.

Facebook Connect, which was launched in 2008, is a way for outside applications to access a person’s profile information when they register or use a service. It makes it easier to sign-up for new programs, because you don’t have to re-enter all your information. And because Facebook has always emphasized real identities, it’s more likely to give developers (and advertisers) accurate information about user demographics. The more applications Facebook Connect can bleed into, the stronger the company’s chances are of building an advertising platform across the mobile web where it can connect brands with apps or sites fitting a target audience.

An intrepid reader shares a video of Moissinac’s presentation below:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6413506&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Henri Moissinac over introductie van Facebook Connect for Mobile from Erwin Boogert on Vimeo.

Turns out, Facebook might be a good place to start. If say, a popular game application gets a user to sign in using their Facebook account (by using something called Facebook Connect), the application owner can now tap into Facebook to find out all kinds of social data about that user, such as age and gender. This information, in turn, can be served to advertisers and marketers so that they know which applications they should be targeting.

Enter Pinch Media, a company that helps with that process. As soon as Facebook announced over the weekend that it had made it easy for iPhone applications to use Facebook Connect, Pinch swung into action. It has just released an analytics product that tracks users of Facebook Connect on iPhone applications, and provides the developers with age and gender information about their users for the first time.

This is all very early days, and it’s too early to tell whether Facebook Connect will take off in a major way, but it does possibly point to a big coming trend — especially if developers figure out its way too hard to develop a relationship of their own with users (given a user’s fatigue in creating yet another relationship) and instead opt to accessing their user info via Facebook.