AUSTIN, Tex. — The only thing more challenging than deciphering the names of all the social-minded Web sites battling for attention at the South by Southwest technology conference here — Brizzly, Vicarious.ly, Stalqer, Quora and so forth — would be the chore of signing up for each one individually.
But a growing number of start-up companies are getting around this problem by, in essence, outsourcing the sign-up process. They are making use of a Facebook service that lets users log into new sites using their Facebook credentials. The free service, Facebook Connect, can help nascent Web services recruit a healthy crowd of users in a hurry, and help the users find their friends on those sites.
At the same time, the service reinforces Facebook’s role as the central hub of the social networking world.
Facebook Connect has helped give rise to a new wave of social Web services that benefit from piggybacking on Facebook and its 400 million users.
Amanda Lenhart, a researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that services like Facebook Connect could help people cut through the noise online.
”In a way, these services are a response to the ever-increasing amount of information on the Web,” she said. ”How are you going to filter it? We need our network and like-minded people to connect us to the information we need the most.”
