The web is making it personal

gigaom - 4.21.10 (by Liz Gannes)

Facebook, as expected, launched at its f8 conference in San Francisco today its master plan to make the rest of the web social. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the social networking company’s director of product, Bret Taylor, laid out three major initiatives to that effect.

The f8 launches expand on the concept of authenticating on sites using Facebook Connect — which reached 100 million users in its first 15 months — and sending back updates to the Facebook news feed. Most interestingly, Facebook will move from the idea of a transitory stream of actions to give outside sites persistent access to its users.

First, social plugins are little widgets that bring Facebook to the rest of the web. They offer “instant personalization,” said Taylor, with the goal of increasing user engagement, using an iFrame and a cookie remembering the Facebook user. So when you visit a website, even if it’s new to you, you’ll see which friends have also logged in there, what their activity is and a set of recommendations based on their actions.

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