It didn't take long for Facebook to react to the announcement by MySpace Thursday that it would enable other Web sites to tap into information about its users and their friends. Facebook's announcement, in a blog post Friday afternoon, is a bit sketchy on the details and has all the appearance of being rushed to match MySpace. Still, what the company calls Facebook Connect offers many of the same capabilities and a few more, too. As I wrote yesterday, there is a big shift in how the social networks are thinking about how they relate to other sites and developers. In the first round, the social networks invited others to make their sites better - widgets on MySpace pages, applications on Facebook. Now the social networks are becoming even more extroverted: They are offering to use the information they have about users to make other sites better, too. MySpace, and now Facebook, will let users who have created profiles on their sites - with photos, favorite bands and so on - use that information to fill out profiles on other sites. Since every site seems to encourage users to create a profile to describe themselves, this can help them avoid copying the same information over and over again. Facebook Connect adds another feature (which I'm sure MySpace will copy): Web sites will be able to let users log in and create accounts with their Facebook names and passwords. This is similar to what Microsoft tried and failed to build with its Passport system. AOL tried, too, and no one noticed enough to remember that it failed as well. More recently, there has been a movement towards a standard known as OpenID to allow people to log in to one site with an ID issued by another. But so far, it is too complex to use and hasn't gotten much traction. The idea just may work, however, for social networks. Between them, MySpace and Facebook have many tens of millions of members who already use those sites as a part of their identities. Moreover, there is a powerful reason to use your social-network identity on certain sites: You can bring along your friends. In Facebook's example, if you logged into, say, Digg with a Facebook account, you could see the news articles that have been recommended on Digg by all your Facebook friends. (Facebook uses Digg as an example even though the news site hasn't agreed to participate in its program.) Of course, the privacy issues here, as in so much of the social networking world, are tricky. Ben Ling, Facebook's director of product marketing, told me that you would see the activities on Digg of all your Facebook friends, not just those that explicitly use Facebook Connect. I pressed him to explain how this would work, both from a technical and a privacy point of view. He refused to answer, saying details would be published in a few weeks. Forward thinkers like Esther Dyson have been predicting for a long time that we will create a virtual representation of our identities that may help mediate how we connect to (and hide from) others online. This is happening now because the social networks have helped users build an identity they want - how they express themselves to their friends - which might now be able to be expanded for other purposes. - NYT __
