If you use the web regularly, and I’m assuming most of you do because you’re here visiting my little ol blog, then you’ve most likely come across websites that allow you to “Connect with Facebook” rather than creating a whole new account through their website.  I feel like this is one of Facebook’s strongest features, and one of the reasons that it is now leading the pack when it comes to social networking.   For webmasters allowing your visitors to Connect with Facebook rather than sign up for a whole new account at your site is good for you in a variety of ways, but most importantly it allows users to feel safer about how their information is being transferred.  They already trust facebook, but if your site is one that they’ve never heard of before they could be hesitant about giving out their information on sign-up.  Here’s what it looks like when you connect with facebook through Digg.com:

Facebook Connect

For users, choosing to connect with facebook is great because it’s a great way to market yourself, and build your social network.  Most sites offer ways to send updates on what you’re doing on their site to your facebook account, and vice versa which is great because the more you interact through social networking, the more successful your going to be with your marketing campaign.

The “Connect with Facebook” technology isn’t a new one, but it has caught on much quicker than previous similar technologies.  I believe it was Google who started it when they started allowing webmasters to create links to google accounts.  You could allow users to login with their Google id, but it wasn’t near as feature rich as the Facebook connect is now.  Facebook is a Social Network, and therefore all of the information you could possibly need for an account with your website is there, and accessible which was not the case with the Google Connect.