A year after the Beacon privacy debacle which left its execs totally feeling the *facepalm*, Facebook has begun its publicity push for Facebook Connect, announced in May.

Seen as the next iteration of the Facebook platform, Connect does much the same thing as Google’s Friend Connect and MySpace’s Data Availability — it allows users to use third party sites via their favourite social network (part of the social web’s ongoing quest for the grail of the single sign-on). The third party sites get some profile information out of it, and a bit more web traction should users choose to publish their activities to an activity stream.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch calls it the biggest battle yet for social networks: you, your identity and your data on the open web.

Tweeting a pointer to the New York Times’ coverage of the launch, Dave Winer tips federation as the next big thing in the social media space.

Om Malik at GigaOM questions this, suggesting the way forward for the social web will depend on what users like best: “The big question facing the social web depends on the direction it needs to take. A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has lead to the idea of “federation.” On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — aggregate. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks.”

Meanwhile, under the radar…
Adding another dimension to the argument, Malik picks up on yesterday’s global launch of Power.com, as does VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, all of which provide thoughtful reviews of the site’s functionality.

This Brazilian start-up has come from seemingly nowhere with 5 million registered users in Brazil and India, and the backing of high calibre investors, including Esther Dyson. It’s punting what it terms a ‘social inter-networking service’, which acts as both aggregator and two-way communicator across a slew of social networking sites and messaging services.

At the moment it works with Facebook, Hi5, MSN, MySpace and Orkut. LinkedIn support is coming soon, expected before the end of the year, and Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Skype as well as others should be supported in early 2009.

Malik finds Power.com’s data-sharing Ts and Cs somewhat quease-making: “I am not sure I want to aggregate and trust all my private information, including my personal communications (IM messages, emails and what not), to a tiny startup. What assurance is there when it comes to fidelity of my data? … Instead, I very much like Loic Le Meur’s concept of ‘centralized me’. ‘I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service,’ he wrote. I couldn’t agree more.”

Twitterati life-tweeting all the rage
What would a Social Media Influence post be without some reference to the latest shenanigans playing out on Twitter? With that, we bring you news of the latest addition to the Twitterverse,  @ajmcintosh, who at three days old is possibly the world’s youngest Twitter user. Blame the kid’s precocity on his dad, @nmcintosh, aka Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development for guardian.co.uk and soon to be editing WSJ.com Europe. Congrats all around.