Facebook: The Guardian To Integrate Facebook Connect & More

Facebook announced this morning at a briefing in London attended by Brand Republic, in which they covered recent stats, that The Guardian newspaper will be integrating Facebook’s Connect across their site in the near future.

It’s a feature that has has to an extent been left to the blogging community and various web based companies such as Digg but now looks to be adopted by more mainstream media services and companies.

Globally Facebook has recorded 25,000 implementations of Connect which on the face of is a minimal amount considering they also announced Facebook now has 350 million users worldwide.

With the UK now having 23 million of those, there is a substantial audience which would be able to conveniently login to services such as the one the Guardian will be introducing.

Users data being seems to be compromised on a common occurrence of late and websites being able to pull a users data from a central location such as Facebook would surely increase security.

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The Guardian Jobs third party databases were hacked back in October and it would be great to see the newspaper using this as an opportunity to use Facebook Connect for this and other services instead of just commenting.

Facebook also went through various other statistics and targets including CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanting to reach 1 billion users.

• The average Facebook user spends 25 minutes a day on the site.
• Facebook now has 90,000 apps
• X-Factor Facebook Fan Page pulled in 875,000 fans in 4 weeks.
• SkySports recorded 400,000 fans in the same period.
• 10,000 users a day become a fan of a page.

The colossal amount of usage the fan pages are seeing is being met with equal investment in the development of them by brands such as the ones feature here.  The ability to communicate so closely with users exposed and using the brand is unparalleled by any other service at current.