Inside Facebook

As expected, Facebook today is launching Facebook Connect, the extension of the Facebook Platform to the rest of the web. The Developer Sandbox is opening today, but Facebook is not announcing an official launch date other than “this fall.”

Speaking about Facebook Connect today at the f8 developer conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We think we’re at a point today where things are going to decentralize quite a bit, and we want to push this forward. We think the best way to do this is to build the core platform, the feed infrastructure, and a variety of communication mechanisms. But we fully expect that in the future less of this is going to happen on Facebook.com and more is going to happen on others’ applications. This year, we’re going to push for parity between what applications inside Facebook can do, and what applications outside Facebook can do,” said Mark Zuckerberg.

“Our goals for Facebook Connect are: 1) build the same kinds of applications across the web, 2) share information across the web, 3) control your information across the web. This time, your Christmas won’t be ruined. We’ve learned from last time. We’re giving users much more control. We’re also making available the standard requests and comments interface for web sites to implement in the first version of Facebook Connect.”

Launch partners included in the demo were Digg, Six Apart, and Citysearch. Additional launch partners: Amiando, CBS.com, CNET, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Evite, Flock, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Seesmic, Socialthing!, StumbleUpon, The Insider, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo and Xobni.

Facebook Connect will launch in beta this summer, and live to all users this fall.