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But although Facebook has big business plans for Connect, the social network has proceeded carefully in this early stage as more questions about Facebook data ownership and privacy emerge.

Since in early December, more than a thousand sites have joined the program. Some of these early adopters of say they've seen huge increases in traffic to their sites. They've also seen substantial spikes in registration - a huge barrier for many websites because people are generally loathe to fill out the same types of forms over and over again, while memorizing several user names and passwords for each service.

"There's a big barrier there," says Brian McCarthy, the VP of products and marketing for , a website that hosts user-generated reviews of restaurants, bars and hotels. "Facebook Connect has had a huge impact on increasing our registration. Now people can go click click, using Facebook Connect, and they can immediately be writing a review in seconds."

While McCarthy wouldn't give detailed numbers, as 's Connect implementation is in beta, others haven't been so shy. Facebook Connect partner sites such as Gawker, a blogging network, experienced a 45 percent increase in registration, said , a senior manager of the Facebook Platform (the technology that fuels Connect), in a with CIO.