Last week Facebook announced the launch of a new set of Facebook Connect features that allow instant "personalization" of your browsing experience at websites like Docs.com and Pandora. The idea is that if you're already logged into Facebook and you visit those sites (and, in the future, many more sites besides those two), Facebook will share a huge amount of your personal, private information with them and allow them to "personalize" your experience.

Facebook announced at the f8 conference this week the launch of the latest version of the Facebook platform, including notably the new Facebook Connect features that they'd previously announced via their Facebook blog.

Since social networking went "big time" a few years back, countless companies are scrambling to put together a strategy for promoting their brand on major social networks. The two largest social networks, Facebook and Twitter, offer very different ways to build your brand and promote it socially; in the final analysis, Facebook may be the better platform for straightforward brand-building. Here's seven reasons why Facebook is better than Twitter for building your brand:

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been sending not-too-subtle signals for a long time now that the future of Facebook won’t be happening at the Facebook.com domain. The world’s largest-growing social network will take a great leap toward that eventuality this year, beginning in April.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, that’s when Zuckerberg plans to launch a new set of Facebook tools for Web developers – who want to make their websites off the Facebook.com domain work (and even look) more like Facebook pages on the Facebook.com domain.

Google Friend Connect: One. Facebook Connect: Zero.

At least, that's how it seems to me, after having watched the two butt heads over the last few months. There was a ton of hype surrounding each (particularly Facebook Connect), but now that the smoke has cleared a little bit we're starting to get a clearer picture of how these competing technologies are going to play out over the coming months and years.

So far, it looks to this writer like Google Friend Connect is serving Facebook Connect up a big heaping plate of humble pie - for a few good, simple reasons.

Here's a little video courtesy of the folks over at Six Jumps, the folks responsible for the Sociable Facebook Connect Plugin for the Wordpress blogging platform. As we mentioned last week, this is one of the first plugins to take advantage of Facebook's new data availability feature, Facebook Connect.

Since the recent launch of Facebook Connect, Facebook's new data availability feature that lets users link up their Facebook profiles with other websites around the internet, developers have been working overtime.

Facebook launched its long awaited Facebook Connect feature this month - to an initially underwhelmed audience. The feature, which allows users to bridge the gap between their Facebook identities and their identities on Facebook Connect Partner sites, went relatively unnoticed by the majority of Facebook users.