That Happened!

Seattle - Teenagers have MySpace. Professionals have LinkedIn. Facebook is hoping to be the social network for everyone, and help users to maintain that identity across the entire Internet.

With Facebook Connect, users not only have a profile with optional photo albums, notes and games but they can now use that profile when making blog comments or participating in forums across the Web.

Facebook Connect is an identification and registration system, similar to OnlineID. Casual users of Facebook can now become part of communities they’re already interested in without having to register with dozens of other names and passwords, kept on dozens of different sites. The developers hope that users log on to Facebook and use it as a central hub from which to explore the Internet. Facebook Connect is one solution for a person with varied interests but want to maintain one alias - their name - and one profile throughout the Web.

CNET, a technical product review site, is just one Web service that will be opting in to allowing Facebook users to browse and comment on the site. You can still log in by using a CNET user name and password, or Facebook users can now log in using the same information they’ve already submitted through Facebook, allowing for easier access to the sites and information they were already interested in. The Six Apart blogging services, Twitter’s micro-blogging service, Digg’s bookmarking site and CitySearch are also part of the Facebook Connect network.

While sites get more numbers, some are concerned about the limiting data they’ll be able to collect on the users that access registered-access-only information through Facebook Connect and similar services. Typically, sites use cookies and page views to determine what users are interested in and collect valuable advertising information. But now, Facebook itself will the centralized source for that data when users use its service to access other sites. This gives more information to Facebook and its affiliates, but it’s unclear how much information third-party sites, like CNET, will be able to find out about its own users.

Facebook Connect presents the next entry in the data portability debate. On one hand, many casual Internet users are annoyed by having to remember different user names and passwords for each site they visit, as well as disliking the necessity to type in the same information found in most online profiles over and over. However, users may also want to have different privacy settings for different sites - perhaps they don’t want each site to be able to access photo albums, friends lists or their browser history.

MySpace, Google and Yahoo! are all working on similar applications, making sure the data portability debate sees plenty more coverage as online presence continues to increase.