Facebook announced that 24 Web sites and applications have joined its efforts to make the Web more open and connected through Facebook Connect. A developer ‘sandbox’ is now available so developers worldwide can start working with Facebook Connect.
Facebook believes that enabling users to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while trusting that their privacy is protected, makes the Web more open and connected. Facebook Connect allows users to bring their Facebook account information, friends and privacy to any third party website, desktop application or device.
Digg, Six Apart, and Citysearch were featured live during Zuckerberg’s keynote demonstrating their planned implementations of Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect will be generally available to users in the fall.
“Digg surfaces the best content on the Web as voted on by its community of 26 million,” said Kevin Rose, founder of Digg. “Facebook Connect will help us promote more conversations on Digg by giving Facebook’s 90 million users an opportunity to sign-in to Digg with their Facebook accounts and become part of the active Digg community. This allows both Facebook and Digg users to more easily share the content they care about with the people they care about.”
With Facebook Connect, users benefit from the following features:
Trusted Authentication – easily authenticate into partner sites using their Facebook account
Real Identity – leverage their real identity across the Web in a trusted environment
Friend Linking – take their friends with them wherever they go, enabling trusted social context anywhere on the Web
Dynamic Privacy – assurance that the same privacy settings users have set up on Facebook will follow them wherever they decide to login throughout the Web
Social Distribution – share actions on partner sites with their friends back on Facebook through feeds Additional planned participants at launch include: Amiando, CBS.com, CNET, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Evite, Flock, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Seesmic, Socialthing!, StumbleUpon, The Insider, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo and Xobni.
The news follows launch of MySpace Data Availability, the rival social network’s product for porting profile data, on Flixster and Eventful.
In April ‘08 Facebook launched their Translation application to 21 additional languages, now developers to translate their applications into different languages will use this tool.
