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Facebook or Facebook Connect. What’s the diffrence?

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:July 24, 2008

In a speech at his company’s annual conference for developers (San Francisco), called F8, Mark Zuckerberg (theoretical net worth of $1.5 billion USD), Facebook’s 24-year-old chief executive, also demonstrated the company’s new design. And number of new ways the company plans to better integrate the popular social-networking site with outside Internet services.

He also announced plans to begin verifying applications, which aims to reduce the number of unwanted application requests users receive.He also announced more details of a new service called Facebook Connect, which allows people to log on to other sites, such as Digg.com, with their Facebook accounts.It will also allows users to interact with their friends on Facebook while using other popular Web services.

Facebook Connect has four primary features:

Trusted Authentication – Anywhere during the user’s experience that the developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted. This is a proprietary authentication mechanism, but is more streamlined than the existing method and will not require a redirect back to Facebook.

Real Identity – Users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the open Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

Friends Access – Users will be able to take their friends with them wherever they go on the open Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites, and will be able to show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.

Dynamic Privacy – As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date.

“We are going to see the big social networks start to decentralize into a series of social applications across the Web,I think we are at the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.” Mr. Zuckerberg said.Facebook Connect, a way that other Web sites can integrate parts of Facebook’s service. Web sites can ask users for their Facebook user name and password, instead of creating an identity verification system themselves, and offer their users the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook.

For example, the mobile service company Airtel, based in Mumbai, India, helps people find their friends and see what they are doing on a map on their mobile phone. It will use Facebook Connect so its users do not have to re-enter their connections to the friends they want to track.

Facebook Connect is a two-way highway — information about a user’s activity on those other Web sites also travels back and appears on the “news feed” on Facebook, where it is seen by that person’s friends on the service. But Mr. Zuckerberg said users could strictly control what they share, jokingly referring to last year’s controversial Beacon advertising program, which was viewed as being overly invasive.

“We paid a lot of attention to making sure that people have complete control over what is in their feed,” he said. “We learned from last time.””When we talk about the movement we’re a part of, it’s important for us to have a very clear sense of our mission and the purpose behind what we’re all doing,” the new, “What, Me Beacon?” Zuckerberg told the assembled.”I really want to see us build a product that allows you to really feel a person and understand what’s really going on with them and feel present with them.”The social networking giant hopes to hit the 100 million-user mark by the end of the year and plans to extend its reach even more by expanding overseas.

“I’m the first to admit that we made a lot of mistakes and there are a lot of things we have to learn,” Zuckerberg said. “Including how to work more closely with developers and how to make sure applications that provide the most long-term value are going to work best in our ecosystem.”

“When we look back at the last year, we have gotten a lot done,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ve advanced a lot toward building a meaningful social platform and a community.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s precocious chief executive, outlined on Wednesday the steps in a programmers’ conference that underscored the growing influence of the Web site that he started 4 1/2 years ago in his Harvard University dorm room.

A crowd of about 1,500 programmers turned out to hear Zuckerberg discuss how he hopes to make it easier for people to share information and entertainment wherever they go on the Web.

Zuckerberg, 24, is counting on programmers who aren’t employed by Facebook to play a vital role in realizing his vision.

More than 30,000 applications have been designed to run on Facebook since the company opened its site to outside developers 14 months ago. The most successful applications have been embraced by millions of Facebook users, helping to turn the startups that developed them into hot commodities.

Facebook estimates that the makers of its top applications have raised a combined $200 million from venture capitalists. The applications offer a wide variety of features, including sharing photos, recommending music and playing games.

“I have to credit Facebook with a large part of our success,” said Hadi Partovi, president of iLike, which offers a music-recommendation application. Partovi said about half of iLike’s 30 million users signed up through Facebook.

As the number of outside applications have swelled, Facebook’s users have ballooned from 24 million in May 2007 to about 90 million today. The rapid growth has narrowed MySpace.com’s lead in the Internet’s social networking niche and helped privately held Facebook secure a $240 million investment from Microsoft Corp.

Zuckerberg is setting out to broaden the appeal of Facebook’s outside applications by giving programmers access to Facebook’s tools for translating into 20 different languages.

Facebook also is trying make it easier for its users to transplant their personal profiles and favorite applications to other sites.

The “Connect” initiative, announced in May, moved a step closer to fruition Wednesday with the opening of a “sandbox” for programmers to begin making their applications more portable. Two dozen Web sites, including Digg, Citysearch and Movable Type, already have signed up for Connect. Facebook expects the feature to debut in autumn.

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