Facebook has today launched its new browser to allow its members to browse other sites and use their Facebook details to connect to that site and re-broadcast to their friends on Facebook. Major sites such as the Discovery Channel and the social bookmarking site Digg have been amongst the first to sign up to Facebook Connect.

This is the latest advance in Social Networking and is a big indicator for the future that this is the next progression of how companies will utilize it as a marketing tool. They are attempting to make the web a smaller space for browsers by reducing the number of different accounts needed to access content and interact with the web.

It is also a sign that Facebook is attempting to become an even bigger part of the average web browsers experience. Almost everybody utilizes Facebook as a utility and it is very conceivable that the next steps could be to turn the network of sites that they already have on board into the first Social Network Search Engine. By using your profile page and some of the existing anticipatory features that are already present they could return completely tailored searches. For example, if under favorite music you have Oasis and when you search live music it could return Oasis tour dates at the top as they know this may be relevant.

It terms of Search Engine Optimisation, this places a huge emphasis on Social Media Optimisation (SMO) as a future method of being the key tool of the next 18 months. This is especially true of sites that hope to be at the cutting edge of the latest developments in search. This can only be compounded by the fact that Google is opening up its search engines to include its universal search in 2009.