On December 4, 2008, Facebook Connect opened for business. It was the first major extension of the Facebook platform, allowing users to log into their favorite Web sites with their Facebook credentials and move their social graph anywhere on the Web.
Now a year and five days later, Facebook is (belatedly) celebrating the birth of one of its most successful products. Sixty million users successful, in fact.
The company revealed that, since December of 2008, Facebook has become integrated on more than 80,000 Web sites (probably not including the countless ones using apps like Disqus) and is in use by more than 60 million Facebook users. That amounts to 160,000 new Connect users every single day.
While those numbers are indeed impressive, they still only represent 17 percent of Facebook's 350 million total users. Still, that gives Facebook Connect more users than both Twitter and LinkedIn.
Connect has been an incredible platform and a major driver for Facebook's increasing growth and influence around the Web. It originally began as a counter to MySpace's data availability initiative and was in fact integrated with key partners all the way back in July 2008, which I kind of consider Connect's real birthday.