Facebook's move to export its social networking features across the Internet could bolster the company's advertising business and
pose an increasing threat to the Web's reigning advertising giants. Facebook, which has more than 400 million registered users, is the No. 1 website in the United States by page views, according to comScore.

But it is a relatively small player in the online ad market, where Google's paid search business dominates, and a variety of Web portals and ad networks battle over billions of dollars in graphical display advertising. With its new initiative to expand beyond the borders of Facebook.com, however, Facebook has created the framework for a new generation of highly targeted ads.

The so-called Open Graph project weaves Facebook's popular social networking capabilities directly into third-party websites. A visitor to a news website, for instance, can click a button to "like" certain news articles, and see which of their Facebook friends have endorsed content on other websites. "Having all this data and all this time from consumers almost can't help but to position Facebook in a very strong way for online advertisers," said Forrester Research analyst Augie Ray.

In the first week, 50,000 websites signed up to provide Facebook features on their sites, according to the company. The "like" button was served up to Web surfers visiting third-party sites more than 1 billion times in the first 24 hours. All that social activity vastly expands Facebook's trove of data about users-information that can improve marketers' ability to reach consumers that share specific interests or traits.

"The field in which they (Facebook) can now play, it went from a 10-yard field to a full football field," said Michael Lazerow, the CEO of Buddy Media, a company that helps businesses advertise on Facebook. Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Altimeter Group, believes Facebook will not only collect more data, but expand its inventory of ad space by eventually serving ads to the websites offering Facebook's social networking features.

"This is definitely the precursor to a larger advertising opportunity," said Owyang, though he said it will take some time for Facebook to roll out the full panoply of ad features. As a private company, Facebook does not disclose its financials, though industry estimates for its 2009 revenue range from $500 million to $650 million.