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When Facebook Connect launched a little over a year ago, Facebook said it had big things planned for the service, which lets users log in to third-party sites with their Facebook credentials and bring their social identity with them. The numbers now seem to bear out those high hopes.

The social network said Wednesday that Facebook Connect is now available on more than 80,000 Web sites and is being used by more than 60 million people. Wow.

"Facebook was developed with the idea that friends make every experience better, and with Facebook Connect that same concept is extended off of Facebook so that you can view your News Feed and updates where and when you want," the company wrote in a blog post. "With just a few clicks on an external Web site, your Facebook content, privacy settings, and friends follow you to make your experience on that website more social and meaningful."

Perhaps Facebook Connect's best quality is ubiquity. The service is employed in several iPhone apps, it's available on sites like CBS.com (Disclosure: CBS.com is owned by CBS, which also owns CNET), as well as this site. Even Xbox 360 owners can use Facebook Connect.

But just where Facebook will be taking Connect in the future is unknown. The company didn't say in the blog post whether it had any plans to update the service. All it said was that "soon, connected experiences will extend to even more platforms, all with Facebook as the underlying technology."

Any guesses? Let's hear what you think in the comments below.

MySpace's rumored adoption of Facebook Connect could be happening in the near future--as soon as early 2010, Inside Facebook reports.

MySpace and Facebook have historically been rivals, with Facebook having ousted MySpace from their spot as the top social network, but their relations have been of a friendlier nature as of late. It appears as though MySpace has effectively given up on winning the social-networking war and is instead focusing on its already strong entertainment business, which includes the market leader, MySpace Music.

The extent of MySpace's Facebook Connect integration isn't yet known, but it is expected initially to leverage MySpace's media content, like music. This news comes right on the heels of Yahoo announcing a massive Facebook Connect implementation across all of its sites. Facebook and Google are currently battling it out for the Web identity crown. With Yahoo and MySpace out of the race, 2010 should prove to be an interesting year as Facebook and Google both try to carve out pieces of the market.

Yahoo is bringing Facebook into just about all of its Web sites, allowing users to update their Facebook status and share news items with friends right from the Yahoo page.

The company announced the integration of Facebook Connect across several key Yahoo Web sites including Mail, News, Sports, and Finance. The idea is to drive even more readers to Yahoo's network of sites--the second largest in the U.S.--by making it easier for them to share things they like with their Facebook friends, some of whom may not have seen the Yahoo item otherwise.

Yahoo already offers a few hooks into Facebook, but this partnership strengthens the relationship between the two sites. The integration will take awhile, however; Yahoo said not to expect the process to begin until the first half of next year.

It foreshadowed the Facebook Connect integration at an event in August, when Yahoo announced social-networking features within properties such as Mail and Messenger. Those updates were restricted to friends within the Yahoo network, however. Facebook and Twitter are where the social-networking junkies congregate.

Facebook made a dual set of announcements this week pertaining to Facebook Connect, the universal-log-in product that it offers to third-party developers and Web sites. Both are aimed at making Connect more ubiquitous: first, a tool called "Translations for Facebook Connect" that simplifies the process of translating the product into international languages, and second, the "Facebook Connect Wizard" for incorporating the product into a site with little developer expertise required.

Facebook first announced that Connect would be available in a multilingual format this summer. Now, the tool can be used to translate any site into the language of a given user who's logged in with Connect.

Last we heard, about 15,000 sites had implemented Facebook Connect, a product that statistics firm Hitwise says gave the social network enough momentum to propel it past once-bigger rival MySpace in terms of U.S. traffic. Launching international translations of the main Facebook site--which the company ended up "crowdsourcing" to users starting early last year--is largely credited with kickstarting the social network's growth overseas.

Facebook now has over 300 million active users around the world, a sizable majority of which are outside the U.S.

Plugging in Facebook Connect information with the three-step 'wizard.'

(Credit: Facebook)

"Establishing a presence on the social Web requires fundamental building blocks," a post by Facebook employee Alex Himel explained as it announced the Facebook Connect Wizard. "Facebook provides these essential tools, including identity for a great registration system, and immediate access to 300 million active global users. Facebook Connect gives entrepreneurs of all sizes--and with varying developer resources--the ability to build traffic efficiently through reaching a relevant audience, while offering an engaging user experience."

The new Connect Wizard takes only three steps, Himel's post said.

Facebook's Aditya Agarwal shows off its new Prototypes feature at TechCrunch50.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook took the stage on Tuesday afternoon at the TechCrunch50 conference for a "Developer Garage" event, to highlight just how important its team of engineers is to the company--and to unveil a new feature to let users play around with what they're up to.

Facebook engineering lead Aditya Agarwal unveiled a new offering called "Prototypes," which makes internal projects on the site accessible as applications on its developer platform. "Some of them are going to be buggy," Agarwal said. "Some of them are going to be super polished."

Prototypes, which is sort of like Facebook's version of Google Labs, had accidentally been unveiled in a company Twitter post earlier on Tuesday afternoon. "It's difficult to predict just what Facebook engineers will come up with next," Agarwal said of Prototypes, which has since been elucidated in a post on the company blog.

Many of Facebook's hottest new features were created in late-night employee "hackathons," Facebook Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer told the audience. Its new iPhone app was created by a single engineer (someone from Facebook told me that this employee was actually a summer intern, which makes it even more impressive), its "Facebook Lite" low-bandwidth-friendly site option was created by three engineers, and the brand new status tagging feature was built in a hackathon.

Some of the new prototypes, Agarwal explained, are photo tag searches, desktop notifications, and a way to filter news feed items to see which ones your friends have recently commented on.

Considering TechCrunch50 is an event devoted to new Web start-ups, Facebook also had a pitch for the entrepreneurs behind them: employee Justin Osofsky then came onstage to talk about Facebook Connect and why start-ups ought to implement . He cited the power of being able to share information on such a massive network, the advantages of not requiring a separate registration process, as well as the proven jumps in page views and traffic that some of the 15,000 sites currently using Facebook Connect have experienced.

At TechCrunch50, Facebook conveniently was able to make the dual announcement that it's cash flow positive and just hit 300 million active users. There are 6 billion minutes spent on the site every day, Schroepfer explained, 1 billion chat messages sent, and 80 billion photos stored on the site (20 billion individual photos, each stored in four different formats).

Within an hour of the site opening up the floodgates to vanity URLs this summer, 1 million had been reserved, Schroepfer explained. He reiterated that the company's engineers were what kept it all afloat.

"The problem with this is, we (were) basically asking 200 million people to show up at the Web site at about exactly the same time," Schroepfer said. "Most people would call this a denial of service attack. We called it a product launch."

Traffic firm Hitwise says Facebook eventually overcame MySpace in terms of U.S. traffic as a result of the launch of its Facebook Connect universal log-in product, according to a post from analyst Heather Dougherty.

"The number of Web sites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 Web sites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others," Dougherty's post read. "And what is really interesting is to look at the year-over-year growth in the market share of visits to Facebook, because there is a clear uptick in the growth rate following the launch of Facebook Connect."

And that growth spurt was what made it the biggest site of its kind in the U.S., according to the numbers. The social network officially surpassed MySpace in U.S. traffic during the week of May 30, Hitwise estimated.

Facebook's rapid growth made it pretty much inevitable that it would surpass the News Corp.-owned MySpace, once the clear leader in social networking. But even when Facebook passed MySpace in worldwide traffic, MySpace still had a pretty big edge in the U.S. Ultimately, Facebook passed MySpace in U.S. usage earlier than some thought it would.

If Hitwise's numbers are accurate, it's a big testament to the success of Facebook Connect, which launched in full last December.

MySpace has launched its own universal log-in product, MySpaceID, backed by partnerships with Google and Yahoo. But it's Facebook Connect that has caught on among both the Web-going public and the marketing world.

"A clear benefit of Facebook Connect is the ability of the user to use a single portable identity--and most importantly, one password, rather than logging into multiple accounts across the network of Web sites," Dougherty wrote. "Participation from Web sites in Facebook Connect also has strong implications to appear more often in the search results executed on Facebook resulting from member postings as search becomes a more prevalent activity within this large audience.

Facebook now has more than 250 million active users worldwide.

Facebook announced Tuesday in a post on its developer blog that Facebook Connect--its universal-login product used by more than 15,000 third-party sites--is now available in an array of international languages.

"Developers who've implemented Facebook Connect, including those who have installed social widgets like the Fan Box, now have the ability to decide in which language they want their Facebook Connect features rendered," the post by Facebook's James Lezsczenski read. "When a user first connects to your site, or publishes something back to Facebook, the Facebook Connect content will appear in the language you specify. User-generated content continues to appear in the language in which it was written."

Facebook, which now has more than 250 million members around the world, began launching international translations of its site early last year, encouraging users to help translate the social-networking service into their native languages. This is when Facebook's growth around the world really started to speed up.

Least surprising news of the day: Facebook has officially grown to 250 million active users across the world, according to a post on the company blog by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"For us, growing to 250 million users isn't just an impressive number; it is a mark of how many personal connections all of you have made, and how far we at Facebook have to go to extend the power of connection to the billions of people around the world," Zuckerberg wrote. (The post is accompanied by an animation of how Facebook's growth spread around the world, which is pretty cool.)

Facebook announced that it had reached 200 million members barely over three months ago. Then, Facebook commemorated the occasion with the launch of a new nonprofit-focused initiative, Facebook for Good. This time, they're not launching anything fancy, just assuring members that they're continuing to develop and innovate.

"Today as we celebrate our 250 millionth user, we are also continuing to develop Facebook to serve as many people in the world in the most effective way possible," Zuckerberg wrote. "This means reaching out to everyone across the world and making products that serve all of you, wherever you are--whether through Facebook Connect, new mobile products and the other things that we are building."

Interesting that he specifically mentioned mobile development. Facebook's growth explosion as of late has been largely overseas, and some would argue that the next frontier for the massive social network would be to make better inroads into countries where people are more likely to be accessing the Web on a mobile device than on a computer.

Facebook Connect, which lets external sites use Facebook login credentials and some profile data, has been one of the company's most high-profile projects since debuting about a year ago. It's also been a big success, with some reports that the company may build a powerful advertising network around it.

And "other things" likely entail the social network's virtual currency system, a potentially lucrative product that was finally announced after much speculation but has yet to make any kind of formal debut or rollout.

It took about four months for Facebook to go from 150 million to 200 million members, and slightly longer than that for it to grow from 100 million to 150 million.

Also making Facebook-related milestones this week: "The Accidental Billionaires," the factually questionable account of the social network's early days at Harvard, debuted in bookstores on Tuesday and had cracked Amazon's top-100 ranking by the end of the day.

It really shouldn't be this much of a media sensation, but let's face it: Everybody's talking about how Facebook is finally letting members reserve vanity URLs, letting them customize the Web addresses that lead to their profiles. The feature goes live at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday (9:01 p.m. PDT on Friday) and already, the pundits are going mad.

"This is more than 200 million users, already engaged, simultaneously scrambling in the greatest territory dash since the Oklahoma Territory's land run of 1889, albeit with fewer shotgun injuries," author Douglas Rushkoff wrote in an editorial piece on The Daily Beast about the occasion.

Well, it's not quite that momentous. The thing about vanity URLs is that they're nothing new: MySpace has made it possible for members to replace the string of numbers in their profiles with www.myspace.com/username for years now. Aside from the fact that your profile may have more "Google juice" and it'll be easier to tell people how to find you on the social network, this isn't going to be a huge deal for Facebook members--yet. Except that we all get possessive, and the territory battle for your full name, your old college nickname, or your AOL screen name circa 1996 could get ugly.

The potential difficulty for some users is that Facebook is leaving a lot of questions unanswered. So here's CNET News' quick cheat sheet to what will and what might happen--in case you were wondering.

What happens when the vanity URL feature goes live?

Until this point, Facebook members' profiles have been accessible by unique URLs, but they're hard to remember because they use identification numbers rather than custom names. But starting Saturday at midnight Eastern, Facebook will start bringing up an alert message to members who visit the site--unless they're members who registered after 3:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, or brands that created "fan pages" after May 31. If your Facebook account falls under these criteria, there may be a delay because of Facebook's concern that people will snap up names just to "squat" on them and sell them. That's been a problem in the domain name business for about as long as the Web has been around.

So, assuming you fit Facebook's timeline, the alert message will pop up and give you a number of options for selecting your new custom name: your full name, your first name and last initial, your first initial and last name, or other options that happen to be available. You can also type in your own, provided it's at least five characters long and doesn't include any characters besides letters, numbers, and the dot symbol (though presumably you can only use the dot in between alphanumeric characters). It doesn't appear to be a mandatory switch, though Facebook will probably keep bugging you about it if you don't switch immediately.

Are any names taken already?

Yeah, if your name is "Mark Zuckerberg" but you aren't that Mark Zuckerberg, you might not get what you want even if you're the first guy logging in at 12:01 a.m. Some Facebook employees have already started using their vanity URLs, and some very popular brands' "fan pages" have them set already as well. Facebook has a request form for businesses that want to make sure their trademarks stay out of other members' user names.

More recently, Facebook also reserved names for some public figures who were at the risk of impersonation or URL squatting, and additionally offered names early to some journalists and analysts covering or working with Facebook--which means that, yes, www.facebook.com/carolinemccarthy is reserved already. (For what it's worth, Facebook told me I could accept that user name that they'd reserve, but if I wanted any other one I'd have to wait until the public name selection became available.

So it doesn't have to include my real name?

Facebook has always been adamant about making sure that members use their real names in their profiles. That's not the case with the new vanity URLs; you are officially allowed to use a nickname, your Twitter username, or the results from what happens when you run your name through a pirate name generator, as long as nobody's claimed it already. If it contains obscenities, though, Facebook will probably flag it for removal.

Is it really true that I can't change it?

That's what it sounds like. Facebook has well over 200 million members. Customer service has never been its greatest strength, either. Good luck getting them to accept your extremely urgent need to add your middle name.

Will Facebook's servers hold up?

We don't know. But considering the PR disaster that would ensue if Facebook crashed during the "land grab," it's safe to assume that the social network has been working very hard to make sure it can withstand the onslaught of members eagerly logging on as early as they can.

"We underwent testing before announcing the feature and we are taking steps to handle additional traffic," Facebook spokesman Larry Yu said in an e-mail. "It's hard to get into specifics since it's difficult to predict what traffic will actually be like."

For a second opinion, we sent an e-mail over to a representative at uptime monitoring firm Pingdom to see if it thinks there's a serious possibility that Facebook could crash entirely. Its answer: probably not.

"What I suspect is that we won't see any slowdown, and if we do it won't be much," the company's e-mail response read. "But who knows? The only ones with a clue right now are Facebook's engineers. However, if they have enough of a performance margin for several months of organic growth in their user base, they should be able to handle the increased number of visitors tomorrow."

Where will this go from here?

Facebook user names could go in a heck of a lot of directions; the post announcing the vanity URLs coyly hinted that "we expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook user name in the future." It's a good guess that at some point you'll be able to log into the site with your user name, rather than your e-mail address. This, obviously, could then be extended to sites using the Facebook Connect or even the site's forthcoming virtual currency.

So what do I do now?

If you care enough about Facebook vanity URLs to have read this all the way through, I guess it's time to set an alarm clock.