Can Facebook Build a Better Passport?
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.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/can-facebook-build-a-better-passport/