Facebook is working hard to embed itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. So imagine if as an outside developer or website administrator you could hook into Facebook users’ data and activities directly, and persistently, for far longer than the previous limit of 24 hours? How would this change your online business model?

Organizing the world’s information in this way is an obvious affront to Google. And where Google observes links and relationships between websites from a distance, Facebook is now aiming to become the glue that connects the web itself.

The implications are thrilling, but also frightening - what if Facebook goes down?

The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already quite strong. Facebook’s director of products, Bret Taylor, recently explained just how strong when sharing his own struggle to grow FriendFeed - a real-time social networking company that was eventually acquired by Facebook. Users who signed up for FriendFeed via Facebook Connect were up to four times more likely to become active users than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.

But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode More >