You open the cap and cherry scent wafts into your nostrils. Just as you start to pour the beverage into your mouth you stop and wonder to yourself, “What on earth is Facebook water supposed to taste like?” Perhaps the sweat of 450 million people? No, that would be gross. How about a pleasing mix of black cherry and lime combined with water and sugar? While that’s not what first comes to my mind, the users of Facebook voted for this sugary concoction. My conclusion: don’t crowdsource recipes.

Back in January we wrote about the new flavor and within weeks we had samples sitting on our desks. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to try out the beverage until I was digging through all of my stuff prior to moving across the country. I decided to stop for a brief refreshment break, hoping that my thirst would be thoroughly quenched. As the syrupy beverage dripped down my throat I realized that I would have been better off drinking tap water, as that’s all one really needs.

While you can occasionally find me sipping on a gatorade as I’m walking home from the gym, it’s a rare sight. I’ve tried to reduce my overall sugar intake as my sweet tooth naturally guides me to consuming a couple hundred grams of sugar a day. However I’d much prefer chomping on a chocolate croissant rather than downing a bottle of Vitamin Water’s new Connect flavor.

While it’s a testament to the influence of Facebook, it does no justice to the brand as a whole. While there may be a lot of young employees at Facebook, this feels like something a bunch of teenagers at a concert would pick up as a freebie at the Vitamin Water booth. In other words: you’d take it for free but you aren’t going to be craving a bottle of it anytime soon.

The only other similar drink I could compare it to is “Purple Drink”, a tasty beverage that Dave Chappelle is a fan of. The main ingredients are “sugar, water, and of course purple”. In the Vitamin Water Connect beverage it tastes just like “sugar, water, and red”. I’ve embedded his description below, however be warned that there is cursing in the video! Given that Facebook is phasing out the Connect brand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Vitamin Water do the same thing.

Playstation 3’s PlayTV add-on allows users to watch HDTV right from within the Playstation, and the makers of the service are adding Facebook Connect later this year.  While details are slim, the potential is huge for social TV, as players could watch TV and talk to their friends simultaneously, all from the comfort of their living room.

The PlayTV update was announced on the Playstation Blog and is expected to be released later in 2010.  There aren’t too many  updates relating to the update at this point, if you look to competing features from XBox, you can see that their service promotes watching television and interacting with friends.  Specifically, Microsoft’s partnership with SkyTV allows you to watch a few channels and have your Avatar available and ’sit’ in a room with friends.  You can then have your avatar perform certain actions as you watch the show.  You can also, of course chat with friends.

I imagine this is similar to what PlayTV will be able to offer, but with a tight Facebook integration, maybe it will end up a little closer to how FB Connect is implemented on CNN during important events like the President’s inauguration.  We’ll see and keep you updated as more news is reported.

We seem to be getting more integrated Connect-powered marketing videos as of late with the latest promotion coming from CMT for their upcoming programming block “Adventure Country”. Developed by Campfire NYC, the promotion takes user profile data and integrates it into a 4 minute video clip honoring the individual for the brave acts they’ve committed. It’s a pretty creative video clip and we’ve embedded it below.

If these promotional videos appear to be implemented in a similar fashion to other promotions that we’ve previously highlighted, that’s because the same development teams are building these integrated videos for multiple clients. Campfire NYC was responsible for the Shark Week promotion that we covered last July. However I have to admit that this promotion is probably the most entertaining one I’ve seen to date.

The most challenging aspect of these promotions is that there’s little gaming dynamics and few viral growth components which means that despite the creativity, there’s no guarantee the promotions will drive significant traffic. Given that CMT is probably spending a couple hundred grand through this promotion, they’d probably want to maximize the impact of the videos.

One interesting way would be to build a custom Facebook application that automatically uploads the custom videos to each user’s profile. Then again, developing an automatically generated video is challenging enough in itself (hence the standalone website). Despite the lack of virality, there is plenty of creativity behind the Adventure Country promotion. Check out the video below and head over to the Adventure Country website and click on “Guided Tours” to see your own custom video!

Last July we began wondering if Facebook would start competing with Eventbrite with the integration of Credits and the company’s Events product. Today it appears that the company has decided to partner with Eventbrite. Given that Facebook is “larger than Evite”, this partnership could prove to be extremely lucrative.

While Facebook decided to use Eventbrite to sell tickets to their upcoming f8 conference, a screenshot of the event registration page, which was accidentally published early, showed a new integration which required attendees to use Facebook Connect in order to purchase a ticket. This integration could be part of a broader integration in which Eventbrite uses Facebook as the sole identity provider for all attendees.

While Eventbrite previously implemented Facebook Connect in order to let attendees publish events they have RSVPed to on the site, this is a much more significant integration. The details of the new integration have not been published, but the screenshot below, initially published on Techcrunch, makes the partnership pretty obvious.

My guess is that the partnership announcement will coincide with the launch of f8 ticket sales. Regardless of what the two companies announce, it’s clear that this will be a big announcement given the size of Facebook Events.

Facebook has been testing an alpha version of their latest Facebook Connect library over the past couple months. The new library is supposed to simplify for developers the process of implementing Facebook Connect. Today Facebook is announcing “basic support for XFBML and an advanced data layer for optimizing FQL queries.” While David Recordon of Facebook demoed this to developers at the Washington D.C. developer garage last week, the latest library should make things much easier.

Keep in mind that the latest Facebook Connect JavaScript library is still in alpha mode (not even beta) so running this on a production site may not be the best idea. Facebook Connect has already been growing rapidly however there has been criticism from some about the ease of use in implementing the Facebook Connect service. That’s why Facebook has been working hard to upgrade their JavaScript Connect libraries.

Also of interest was a post from David Recordon announcing that they’ve implemented the new OAuth WRAP specification within FriendFeed. There are two interesting things about this. Most significant is that it appears Facebook continues to support FriendFeed. Secondly, FriendFeed appears to be serving as a testing environment for new authentication models before scaling it to Facebook.

While FriendFeed continues to have a thriving user base, it’s nowhere near as large as Facebook. The development team behind FriendFeed is world class however, and now Facebook will be able to try out new technologies without facing the technical limitations which Facebook’s 350+ million user base presents. If you’re like staying up to date on the latest web authentication models, you can check out some of the libraries reference in David Recordon’s blog post.