Facebook Connects across the web with new feature

If you’re an avid Facebooker like myself (yes, I admit it) then you’re probably aware of an informative gizmo known as Facebook Newsfeeds— that’s right, those tiny little mini posts that appear on your homepage and dish out the 411 of who’s doing what. They also track and publish what you’re doing, like commenting on friends’ photos or installing new applications for your profile. 

Though the Newsfeed feature on Facebook initially received a lot of negative feedback (hey there, Big Brother 2.0), over the months Facebook has provided more security options so users can more or less choose what they want to be published and who can read which posts.

Not quite so successful was last year’s launch of Beacon, the Facebook feature which aimed to let users know what their friends were purchasing online. Rightly so, members were far from pleased with the questionable invasion of privacy (did I mention Facebook switched Beacon on with no warning, and with no opt-out alert?) so the project more or less flopped.

Well, on Monday, Daniel Ionescu reported with PC WORLD that the popular social networking website is working to get a little more social, yet again.

Facebook’s new  feature, “Connect” aims to do just that—connect a variety of websites to one central hub so you can not only navigate to participating websites without having to create a new account or re-login each time, you can read about what your pals are doing on places other than Facebook. Also, Facebook will update your own Newsfeed to show your friends what you’ve been up to.  

Sounds pretty convenient but also a little creepy, right? Thankfully, the Facebook team has learned from his blunders—when the feature launches in a few weeks, members will have the ability to “adjust their privacy settings for which actions will be shared on the social network.”

According the PC WORLD, the following sites have agreed to paritipate in Facebook’s upcoming Connect application:

 

• Movable Type
• Amiando
• CBS.com
• CitySearch
• CNET
• CollegeHumor
• Disney-ABC Television Group
• Evite
• Flock
• Kongregate
• Loopt
• Plaxo
• Radar
• Red Bull
• Seesmic
• Socialthing!
• StumbleUpon
• The Insider
• Twitter
• Uber
• Vimeo
• Xobni

Rival social networking website, MySpace.com, opened up its platform to a similar feature back in July. By collaborating with OpenID, MySpace allowed members to not only take their unique user name and passwords over to an account on a participating website, but all of their profile information as well.