The Fan Video site itself takes professional music videos and inserts your profile picture prominently. The site also features sharing capabilities to post the videos to MySpace, Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, you can create videos for your friends using their profile pictures, and you can choose these friends from your MySpace or Facebook friend lists (depending on which account you used to sign in).

Not a super-useful application (more fun than sheep throwing, I guess), but is this a harbinger of things to come for MySpace? Are they ready to concede the social networking arena to Facebook?

Side note here: although Facebook has eclipsed MySpace in terms of traffic, MySpace still edges out Facebook in ad revenue. So the race isn’t already lost. May be close, though.

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The “Connect Wizard” distills integrating Facebook Connect into a website into three steps. Many popular websites have long used Facebook Connect as a method of signing in to comment, and this effort expands that capability to any size website, even those without awesome tech staff. Facebook reminds us on the developer blog that Facebook Connect gives participating websites “identity for a great registration system, and immediate access to 300 million active global users.”

As part of the effort to bring Connect to the masses, Facebook is also launching a playground. Wait! Before you all run outside for recess, you should know that this playground doesn’t come with a merry-go-round or monkey bars. Says the blog, it “provides code samples for adding profile pictures, user names, and friends to your site.”

Talk about your disappointments.

Just before they announced the Connect Wizard yesterday, Facebook also announced a new translation feature through Facebook Connect. Unaccountably called Translations for Facebook Connect (where do they come up with these names?!), the service can translate participating pages, widgets, IFrames and apps into any of the 65 offered languages.

(You know, as well as machines can.)

(Unless this is secretly a Mechanical Turk. I hear that Facebook is really popular in Turkey.)

Naturally, if you don’t want the most popular search engine in the world handling your site translation, you might be happier with the most popular social network in the world doing it for you. Plus, Facebook has fourteen more languages than Google—though I’m not sure if that includes the regional varieties they offer for Facebook itself. Like English Upside Down. Very useful.

What do you think? Will you add Facebook Connect now that it’s just three easy steps? If you already use Connect, have you seen any advantages? Will you use it to translate for you?

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Mashable reports (emphasis added):

This week Facebook said that it has settled a class-action lawsuit against the product, agreed to shut it down completely, and will establish a $9.5 million “settlement fund” to fund initiatives related to online privacy.

The suit, filed just over a year ago, alleged that Facebook had invaded its users’ privacy, collecting information about them (and others) from around the Internet without their consent. They also said the opt-out was too difficult, since you had to visit each partner site (of which there were 44) to opt out. (However, there was a privacy control to turn the feature off completely).

The settlement must still be approved by the court, in this case, the US District Court of Northern California.

As Mashable points out, however, Beacon’s legacy will live on. By creating partnerships with and data collection from third-party sites, it paved the way for Facebook Connect, which may actually be the biggest feature that added to the site’s global growth.

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Hitwise mentions other factors that have helped FB: the new layout, mobile apps, especially for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Another is certainly the Facebook Connect program, which allows users to share stories in their news feed and make comments on websites and blogs. The program launched in beta during July of last year, then officially launched to developers in early December. The number of websites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 websites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others.

Most convincing, of course, is the cold, hard data:

While it’s obvious that the members of Facebook Connect have helped FB gain some visibility and perhaps even legitimacy, personally, I’m still a little skeptical that Connect did all that. What else was going on then?

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that such a sudden, steep climb came from a snowball effect alone.

What do you think? Is it just a coincidence, or was Connect really the tipping point (for the US, anyway—Facebook had already beat MySpace worldwide at that point)? Do you use Facebook Connect?

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Facebook aimed for greater utility with its logins and unveiled a new feature called Facebook Connect. It’s being touted as an OpenID killer in the single sign-on space.

The concept of single sign-on removes the multiple logins and passwords people use across various web services. By signing into one place, in this case Facebook, that authenticated login serves to provide entry into other sites supporting Facebook Connect.

Jeremiah Owyang suggested brand name companies ought to watch the launch of Facebook Connect.

“Brands that have websites that have social actions (such as buying a product, rating, ranking, or leaving comments) should keep this in mind, as they can now extend the actions to Facebook streams,” he wrote.

Kevin Rose at Digg noted that site’s support for Facebook Connect. “With this new feature, when you are prompted to log onto Digg, you can use your Facebook account information to sign in. Once you Digg a story, Facebook Connect can publish that in your Facebook Mini-Feed,” he said.

In doing that, a Facebook user shares their activity with friends who see that Mini-Feed activity. The appeal to brand advertisers becomes obvious: a mostly youthful, college-educated audience, with money to burn.

Enabling a single sign-on removes one barrier for someone new to a brand name site; they will already have access to that site’s features normally available through registration, a process some people find annoying.

In one example, Citysearch said visitors arriving through Facebook Connect will be able to see what their friends recommend for a given locale. Those recommendations will appear on a Citysearch business profile page; Citysearch plans to have this active later in 2008.