As much as Beacon was Facebook's low point, that service's replacement, Facebook Connect, is vaulting the company to new heights six months after its November 2008 launch.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg occasionally hints that Facebook sees revenue opportunities in selling ads on third-party sites and offering an alternative to PayPal.
But the only way Facebook ever gets to build either of those products is if Facebook Connect -- its service that allows users to log-in to participating third-party Web with their Facebook IDs -- gains massive adoption.
It's on the way there, and could soon become the mainstream Web user's single login for the Internet.
In the Web TV space, TV.com, YouTube, and Hulu have all already signed up, joining over 10,000 other web sites and applications. Facebook Connect is also now integrated with Xbox Live and the Nintendo DSi.
Sources from big media companies and small publishers alike tell us the reason they love Facebook Connect so much is that it's a simple upgrade that immediately accelerates user registrations, engagement and traffic from Facebook.
The only complaint these sources have about Facebook Connect is that Facebook can sometimes be slow to support the technical aspects of the integration. These sources blame a laid-back startup culture. We figure Facebook is probably understaffed.
None of these complaints are keeping media companies from aggressively integrating Facebook Connect. Not with the immediate user-activity boosts it provides.
To that point, Facebook sent us some stats:
- Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
- Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
- Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.
