Facebook Connect, announced back in May, was opened to the public Thursday, allowing its 130-million strong user base to interconnect with multiple desktop apps, websites and mobile devices.

The service allows members to use their Facebook credentials to login to several partner sites which have initially agreed to take part in the program. The road leading up to this moment had started on Facebook’s developer blog, where the company announced it wanted to create a service similar to OpenID. It was a long road however, with months of testing done.

''We opened Facebook Platform in 2007 to enable hundreds of thousands of developers to create meaningful social experiences for users on Facebook.com,'' Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said in a statement. ''With today's launch of Facebook Connect, we're extending that power to millions of entrepreneurs and developers, transforming the Web into a more social place where Facebook's users can engage in trusted social experiences with their friends.''

Facebook Connect intends to bring features to users that integrate their online experience, and eliminate the annoyance of creating multiple IDs for different web sites.

Trusted Authentication lets users log into partners’ web sites with Facebook accounts. Real Identity also brings users’ personal information across web sites partaking in the program. Thirdly, there is Dynamic Privacy, which is designed to keep users in control of their own information securely, choosing which sites they connect with and show which social actions are shared to the Facebook News Feed. This last measure is intended to prevent another Beacon fiasco.

Social distribution offers the (scary?) outlook of a unified web identity with these identities being tracked. Logging into Facebook and being active on a partner site will share the actions a user takes on said sites back to Facebook.

Given, social networking is all about interacting with other people and sharing videos articles and other actions may change the way people interact online, perhaps for the better.

What the partner sites get out of the deal is a feature called Increased Engagement. This component of the Connect service shares users’ personal interest with the partner site which they’ve used.

If a user watches, say, Hulu – one of the partner sites – and has “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” applications or notes on their Facebook page, Hulu will be notified and once a user logs in, bring up the latest episode from the show. The ads will thus be highly targeted to persons already interested. That way they’re more likely to generate leads; this makes the advertisers happy and the revenue increasing.

The fact that activity on partner sites is reported back to their Facebook page is bound to also increase exposure for partner sites, as the user’s friends see their links.

Facebook seems to be determined to create a new ecosystem of online interactivity, and as long as the company doesn’t let third-party sites become too intrusive, it may become a feature well-appreciated by users. Partners will appreciate their advertising cash and extended web traffic as well.