Facebook Connect Now Live

Facebook announced the general availability of Facebook Connect, the next evolution of Facebook Platform. Since May 2007, Platform has rapidly evolved from 100 early ideas to over 52,000 applications with 14 billion page views per month. Over 70% of Facebook users actively use at least one application per month, and over 4,200 applications have more than 10,000 users per month. All of these applications have been built using Platform’s core services. These services allow users to use their profile in applications, easily find their friends, and share information and experiences with their friends through Feed, requests, and more.

With Facebook Connect, you can take the same Platform features and tools that you’ve used to grow your applications successfully, and integrate them into your own website. Key features that you can now bring to your own website include:

• Trusted authentication: Offer Facebook users the option to log in to your site with one click.
• Real identity: Integrate your users’ Facebook identities into your site.
  Friend linking: Let your connected users find their Facebook friends on your site.
• Dynamic privacy: Enable users to bring their information and privacy settings with them to your site.
• Social distribution: Allow users to share actions and information from your site with their friends on Facebook including publishing Feed stories to profiles and sending requests.

In short, Facebook Connect lets users log in to a site using their Facebook account, bring their profile with them, easily find friends also using the website, and share information and experiences using the same features as they would on a Facebook application. Pretty much every feature that you can build with an application on Facebook can be offered through Facebook Connect.

Many sites are already live, including Citysearch (share reviews with your friends), TechCrunch (use your Facebook account to post comments), vLane (shop for cars with your friends input), and Howcast (comment and share how-to videos). These are just a sampling of the many sites that launched during beta period. Early results have been very positive: as many as 2/3 of users registering for the sites are doing so with their Facebook accounts and taking as much as 50% more actions on the sites.

You can check out documentation and sample site, The Run Around, and start Connecting!