Facebook presenta ufficialmente sul proprio blog il nuovo servizio Connect:
You can easily log in using your Facebook account, and from there, you’ll be able to interact with all of your Facebook friends. They’ll be able to see some of the same profile information they can see on Facebook, which is fully controlled by your privacy settings. When you write a review for a restaurant, you’ll have the option to publish that story back to Facebook, where your friends can see it, too. With Facebook Connect, it will be easier for you to share and connect with your friends across the Web.

Un login universale (con tanto di Wiki) che ‘sposta’ Facebook sul mondo Internet esterno: pochi siti al lancio (circa 100, tra cui Digg, CNET, Gawker, Vimeo e molte Università statunitensi) , con l’obiettivo di far frescere velocemente Connect.
Obviously our launch partners don’t cover all the websites you use on a daily basis, so if you want to see this list grow, get in touch with your favorite websites, developers, and services, and tell them you want to connect. With your help, we can all share more information across the web.

Qualsiasi contenuto (commenti, foto, video) venga postato sui siti terzi sarà riproposto su Facebook proprio grazie a Connect. Pregi e difetti? Come spiega Wired,
the main drawback to Facebook Connect is that the social data gathered in these transactions all gets fed back into Facebook. By implementing Facebook Connect, a site owner is agreeing to share any data it collects about users who log in using the system with Facebook — and Facebook alone. Users get the benefit of carrying all that Facebook friend data with them, but they can’t use it anywhere else. If they want to broadcast their activities on Digg through some other means, like a Blogger blog, they’re on their own.

The alternative is OpenID and the Open Stack, a set of open-source technologies being developed by Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Plaxo and other social websites that would allow a more broad system of data portability. But OpenID has been slow to arrive. It’s currently held back by problems relating to user experience and security. There’s been some headway lately, such as the proof of concept add-on for Flock that puts ID management in the browser (where it belongs!), but the picture isn’t yet complete.

Aggiunge l’Economist:
Facebook Connect is thus the latest attempt to solve an old problem. At the beginning of this decade Microsoft, then feared as a bullying monopolist, tried but failed to create a “single sign-on” called “Passport” for the whole web. Nobody signed on. Since then, the web has become more social, but the clusters of human connections, or “social graphs”, tend to be isolated within various networks, sites and services.

The big new idea, says Dave Morin, a Facebook Connect manager, is “dynamic privacy”. It means that, as the social network reaches out across the wider web, users will in theory take their privacy settings with them. Wherever on the web they are, they will be able to choose who among their friends will and won’t see what they are up to. As soon as a user demotes a “friend” from intimate to arm’s-length in his Facebook settings, this will also take effect on other sites.

Bello il termine di privacy dinamica. Che ne pensate?