Facebook wants to take over the web

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With the advent of Twitter - and after the fading of other social networking sites - many have suggested Facebook has hit its high point and that it's all downhill from here.

The numbers disagree - 350 million people regularly use Facebook - and the people behind the site aren't satisfied with Facebook being the place to leave status updates and tag photos.

Instead, they're looking to spread their creation across the web, with Facebook Connect. The system lets other sites integrate Facebook's login. So, rather than registering with every site you visit, you can login with Facebook Connect.

It also means you can bring your contacts with you, so every comment you leave on a Connect site could help draw your friends and other contacts, driving traffic in new ways from search engines.

That's the idea, anyway, according to director of the Facebook Developer Network Ethan Beard, who spoke to IT PRO ahead of the LeWeb conference in Paris this week.

“Our aspirations are not simply to be just a website that people visit and experience at Facebook.com, but really what we’re looking to do is be a technology that allows people to connect wherever they are and whenever they are, and that shouldn’t necessarily be limited to just one website,” he said.

“It’s about giving people everywhere a trusted way to experience the web, the entire web, through the lens of their friends. And that’s what Facebook Connect, at its heart and at its core, is really about.”

Since it's launch last year, the service has grown to 60 million users a month, across 80,000 sites – including half of the 100 most visited sites according to ComScore, and two-thirds in the US.

“We’ve seen takeup with the very largest sites,” Beard said, adding Yahoo has just announced it will be using Facebook Connect, and that Microsoft already does.

But it's not just about the online giants. Thousands of tiny companies are using it to help "drive traffic, engagement and... tap into a user's Facebook identity," he explained.

JibJab

Of course, some of those sites are Facebook rivals. “In the 80,000 sites I mentioned, there are many that could be in many ways viewed as competitors, but we want to deliver value and work with them as partners," Beard said.

"I would expect that - hopefully - in the near future if not in the next year, you will see sites that were traditionally competitors using Facebook Connect to really add value to their site.”

While he had nothing to announce - many will be hoping for Twitter or Google plans - he did note because it's an open platform, anyone could develop on top of it.

“The platform is open so there could be lots of people building things that we frankly just don’t know about, which is exactly how we want it,” he explained.

One example is JibJab. It's a small company that creates viral animated videos using a user's own photos.

It's a “fantastic representation of what can be done when you use Facebook Connect,” Beard said.

"They’ve taken advantage of the simple registration and login, since you’re bringing your Facebook Content with you, they allow you to very easily pull that content into the video that they create with just a few clicks… and then seamlessly share it back to Facebook so all of your friends can see it.”

“They did this all without any of our prompting, without talking to us, obviously we’ve since reached out to them and we want to make sure that everything works really well for them, but it’s a pleasant surprise to see something homegrown and independently created."

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