Facebook & Google Open Connections

Google and social networking site Facebook have unveiled their respective Open ID social projects this month.

First up is Facebook Connect, which enables members to visit participating websites using their Facebook identification.

Users can then broadcast their activities on these external sites to their friends via Facebook feeds.

Among the websites taking part in the project are social news site Digg, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Discovery Channel.

“Facebook Connect is representative of some surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley,” according to the New York Times.

“Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet giants have all announced plans to share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites,” continues the NYT.

And then there’s Google Friend Connect, a project currently in beta which allows webmasters to integrate various social features into their sites through pasting in bits of code supplied by the internet giant.

Google says the service enables visitors to sign in using Google, Yahoo or OpenID accounts and lets them invite friends from their social networks to visit the sites.

More on both projects can be found at Guardian.co.uk.