Facebook, with its open graph announcements at the f8 conference today, is digging itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. Outside developers and existing sites will now be able to hook into Facebook users’ data and activities directly and persistently, keeping logs well beyond the previous limit of 24 hours.

Organizing the world’s information by powering it is clearly a direct affront to Google. Where Google observes links and relationships between web sites from a distance, Facebook aims to be the glue that connects the web itself. The implications are thrilling, but also scary — what if Facebook goes down?

The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already strong. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s director of product, at today’s keynote explained just how strong when speaking of his own struggle to grow FriendFeed, the real-time social company Facebook eventually acquired. Users who signed up for FriendFeed with Facebook Connect were four times more likely to become active than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.

But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode user engagement and relationships. They can use Facebook’s social plugins to expose personalized friend activity and recommendations. And Facebook will establish persistent, dynamic links to users’ participation on connected sites around the web through its “like” buttons.

Users now have the ability to express their interests not only by saying what they like — say, a local restaurant — but by saying what web site represents it — say, a Yelp review page, instead of the official restaurant site. Web services would be silly not to participate.

As a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but ultimately be useful. As one Facebook engineer put it to me today, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be so sweet.”

In preparation for f8, a few Facebook employees hacked together examples of what outside developers could do given the new open graph tools. For instance, Facebook.me would allow users to use Facebook as a CMS. Say you’re one of those crazy MySpace devotees who wants blinking disco lights on your profile. Great. Make a web page, host it at whatever URL you want, uglify it to your heart’s content, and port in data that dynamically connects to Facebook. You can imagine brands and small businesses might want to use this in lieu of a traditional web page.

Another demo, KlugePress, gives the ability to use a nice template and port in Facebook event information. Only users who are invited to the event on Facebook would be able to load a KlugePress invite (this is tricky, and wasn’t really figured out yet for the demo). If users are logged in to Facebook and have permitted access, they can RSVP, comment and see details as they would on the bland Facebook event page. The data itself is sent right back to Facebook. (Pictured above is a KlugePress skin on an older event from my own profile.)

By inviting developers to integrate with it so tightly, Facebook is enabling new opportunities — but also asking for an awful lot of trust.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat for a Q&A at the company’s Atmosphere event yesterday pitching its Apps platform to the enterprise. A couple of his remarks stuck with me today and I wanted to share them as well as a video of the session that Google has now made available to the public.

Schmidt made two specific comments about resource allocation, saying that the hardest and most pressing engineering issues facing Google today are around sharing and mobile. He was talking to the enterprise execs present but his statements were so absolute I think it’s fair to apply them more broadly.

“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.” He continued:

I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.

Schmidt also recommended to the executives present that: “You should always put your best team on your mobile app that enables your service. The answer should always be mobile first.”

As the mobile Internet becomes central for both consumer and corporate users, the core product questions are interoperability, security and safety, Schmidt said. “What’s important is to get the mobile experience right, because mobility will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services,” he added, saying that Google considers phones, tablets and netbooks mobile experiences.

Lastly, to make good mobile, web and diskless computer (aka Chrome OS) apps, Schmidt had a platform recommendation as well: “From our perspective the single most important development has been the arrival of the HTML 5 standard.”

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Daily deal sites are like catnip for web entrepreneurs hunting for good ideas. In most cases, they look and work the same. But one new Groupon competitor, San Francisco-based HomeRun, has innovated useful social features that entice people to purchase coupons such as participation rewards, user profiles and sharing, and group bargaining. Though Groupon and other sites do encourage users to share deals on Facebook and Twitter, there’s still a lot of innovation to be done around things like personalization and socialization.

HomeRun, which appears to have started publishing offers last month, is currently available only in San Francisco. It’s led by CEO Jared Kopf, a co-founder of Slide and AdRoll. Kopf, who founded HomeRun in November and has hired a team including folks from WeatherBill and the Y Combinator program, said he was too busy to talk in detail about the startup just yet. However, the site is open for registrations, so here’s what I’m seeing so far.

HomeRun encourages users to connect their Facebook accounts and shows which of their friends are also on the site. It has built out profiles that show which members have purchased which deals. Giving the site real-world identity makes users more engaged through things like peer pressure, trusted recommendations and a stickier browsing experience.

Some of site’s deals don’t have static prices; there’s a feature called “avalanche” that brings down the price a dollar or so at a time when more people sign up. When the deal closes, everyone pays the last and lowest price.

HomeRun has a point system and offers cash-back credits. You accrue points for visiting the site, inviting new members, sharing and buying deals, and commenting and voting.

Like Groupon and some of the larger sites, HomeRun doesn’t limit itself to a single daily deal. It does a good job of capitalizing on different types of users by rewarding them with special types of deals. For instance, one side feature for users with a lot of participation points is a special deal called “The Private Reserve.” Another, “Beginner’s Luck,” is for users who’ve joined within the last 30 days.

Tweaking the social algorithm to encourage impulse buying and engagement is a great start, but it’s not all you need to challenge a company like Groupon with an established base, $100 million in revenue and profitability. Not to mention folks like LivingSocial, which has raised $35 million to take on Groupon. And these sites have grown to their current stature without HomeRun’s social features.

HomeRun is incredibly young and has changed so many variables — it’s too early to say if it’s got the formula right. But so far, I like its approach, and even if all the competition copies HomeRun tomorrow I’d trust these guys to keep being creative.

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Recommending relevant content can be dramatically effective. After The Filter, a white-label content recommendation system, was implemented on the video site Dailymotion in March, the site experienced a 40 percent increase in time spent and a 25 percent increase in video streams per visit.

Now, after successful trials, The Filter has secured its biggest media partner to date, NBC. The company will power recommendations for short-form videos on NBC.com such as clips from shows such as “Saturday Night Live.” At a time when the video experience is fragmented and competitive, getting a user who actually visits your site to stick around for more than a couple minutes is huge. It’s something folks like YouTube think about a ton.

I was on a panel with The Filter CEO David Maher Roberts at SXSW where he talked about the fascinating array of signals for making recommendations. During a prep session he told me, “We remember but we also forget. Tastes change. What you’re listening to right now is much more important than what you listened to in the last few weeks.” The Filter, which is backed by Peter Gabriel with $8.5 million in funding and initially tried to be a destination site, says it has 95 million uniques across its partners.

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Addicted to Groupon, LivingSocial, YouSwoop and TownHog (and the many other Groupon groupies), where the appeal of an amazing expiring deal snags you — but then you get busy and forget to ever print or use the coupon you bought? It happens to all too many of us. But now there’s a site — DealsGoRound — where you can buy and sell daily deals rather than let them go to waste.

DealsGoRound is a side project of Chicago entrepreneur Kris Petersen, and since beta-launching in 52 cities on March 1 has hosted just 30 transactions. Petersen tells us that he came up with the idea after letting a $160 pair of Segway tours of downtown Chicago expire because he was too busy with work and training for a marathon. “I realized my impulses didn’t always coexist with my calendar,” he said. The site doesn’t verify deals but it doesn’t take a cut of them, either; Petersen wants to monetize through advertising.

DealsGoRound bears a parallel to sites like Cardpool (our profile) and Plastic Jungle, which have emerged recently to buy and sell unused purchases in the $100 billion gift card market. Though interest (and venture funding) in Groupon-type businesses is exploding, it’s not there yet.

But other sites like 8coupons and Yipit have launched side services for daily deals too — aggregating and repackaging them on a map or an email, respectively. In a sense, these sites help grow the Groupon economy in that they increase distribution for deals, which are ultimately monetized by the companies that set them up when people purchase them.

Yipit, for example, sends a very nicely formatted email newsletter of all the deals in your local area, giving top billing to the ones in categories you’ve indicated you like. It’s the kind of thing that makes you unsubscribe from Groupon, losing their tight connection with you and their quantifiable recurring email recipient. After all, being a deal seeker isn’t about brand loyalty; it’s about finding the absolute best and most relevant deal as quickly as possible!

But these are young and evolving concepts. The folks at Yipit told me they’re trying to put together a local advertising network to sell highly targeted deals ads on local blogs and news outlets. As far as new businesses go, that certainly seems like a better and more scalable idea than creating yet another Groupon groupie with its own local ad sales team in every city.