Facebook is looking to resurrect its Beacon platform, that day with a little less controversy. Dubbed Facebook Connect, the company describes the new service as the next iteration of the Facebook platform that allows users to connect their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site.

that opens the door for third-party Web sites to implement and offer more Facebook features, such as showing a user which of their friends additionally have accounts on a site.

“In a positive way, that is the return of Facebook Beacon,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “The difference is Beacon was an advertising program. whether you took some sort of action on a third-party site while you were signed into Facebook, that action would be broadcast back to your friends. folks got upset about it considering they weren’t fully aware they were exposed in that way.”

Beacon vs Connect

Indeed, Facebook drew the ire of thousands

of its users just a year ago with Beacon. Fifty thousand Facebook members signed a MoveOn.org petition by a 10-day period asking the site to respect user privacy.

Like Connect, Beacon was positioned as an option to share actions on other sites with friends on Facebook. But Connect does not have an advertising component.

Here’s how it works: Members can log onto other Web sites using their Facebook username and password and see what their friends are doing on those sites. Connect plus lets users keep their friend network up to moment about what they are doing on those sites. Facebook’s initial lineup includes the Discovery Channel, the San Francisco Chronicle, Digg, Geni and Hulu, according to a report in The New York Times.

“Connect remedies the issues with Beacon in the sense that you would use your Facebook log-in on the other sites, so you are presumably conscious that…

Original post by dhiram