Facebook Connect – another step to open social networks

I’m looking forward to seeing what this yields. In Charlene’s interview with Ben Ling, he uses Yelp as the prototypical example of what Facebook Connect could do:

“I spoke with Ben Ling at Facebook, and the hypothetical example he used was yelp.com. If I link my Facebook identity to my Yelp identity, I’ll be able to port over my profile, my content, my reviews. Also, I’ll be able to see if any my Facebook friends are also members of Yelp — and be able to automatically have our friendships authenticated and visible on Yelp.”

That will be very cool, and perhaps get to what Bijan has talked about for a while about Reviews 2.0

Even more simple, I’m looking forward to being able to find friends using different social services based on my Facebook network.  Most online services allow you to input your email contacts to help find potential friends also using the service.  But allowing me to do the same with my Facebook contacts is much more useful, especially since Facebook has overtaken my email directory as my primary social network.

Currently, I have 388 email addresses in my contact list.  And I actually find myself adding to or updating this very infrequently.

Conversely, I have 462 friends on Facebook.  And these are more than just static contacts.  I’m actually pretty intimately aware of what a lot of these friends are doing because of their status updates, new photos, messages, etc.  

A web experience where I can really pivot on this network will be unbelievably valuable.