NEWS
Facebook has announced that its log-in system, Facebook Connect, is officially open for business for non-Facebook sites.
The social network is making the implementation of Facebook Connect self-service, so anyone who has a site with even a small number of community features can hook into the Facebook social universe.
The benefits behind this are by letting users "register" with their existing Facebook credentials this will boost community involvement and also because what users do on these sites can get reflected back to their activity stream on Facebook.
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Because Facebook Connect is not just a registration system but also a marketing channel with a built-in audience of 130 million monthly active users (according to Facebook), this program will crush competing registration systems.
One can argue the merits of platforms like OpenID or Google's Friend Connect but a technical or philosophical discussion - where OpenID adherents especially would be able to score points on Facebook Connect boosters - would be trumped by the real world.
Sites will adopt Facebook Connect as their users are already actively using it; millions of users have OpenID logins and don't even know it. Second, because it's not just a registration system, it's that marketing channel.
Comments you leave on a Facebook Connect-using site can get posted to your Facebook profile.
Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin told silicon.com sister site CNET News that many beta test sites that have been using Facebook Connect (there are several dozen so far) have been seeing users log in with their Facebook IDs instead of their pre-existing site IDs at about a 2:1 ratio.
Facebook Connect gives site managers the option to tie their local registration credentials to Facebook IDs, so users can log in either way.
As of this writing, the biggest site using Facebook Connect is CitySearch, Morin said.
