Facebook’s (News - Alert) importance as a platform that facilitates business rather than just socializing has been growing day by day. Recently, it has announced that 44 websites are using Facebook Beacon, which allows users to share information from other websites for distribution to their friends on Facebook.

Beacon is the targeted advertising system of the Facebook. Very soon when Beacon is linked to eBay (News - Alert), the business horizons of Fecebook users will further expand to unimaginable levels.

Facebook suggests that reaching millions of people is just 3 lines of code away. With Facebook Beacon, Web site owners can simply determine which user actions they would like publish to Facebook. Beacon supports actions including purchasing a product, signing up for a service, adding an item to a wish list, and more.

Facebook Beacon enables users to promote their brands or businesses and to gain access to viral distribution within Facebook. This option comes handy for the users to promote their business in an organic and social way within the Facebook user groups. Beacon facilitates dissemination of the stories of a user's engagement in such a way that can be compared to a word-of-mouth.

Facebook says, it has designed Beacon to enable effortless sharing while protecting the user privacy. How does it work? When a business Web site sends an action to Facebook, the user is immediately alerted of the story the business wishes to publish and will be alerted again when they sign into Facebook.

When a user logs into Facebook, he receives a prompt asking whether he wants to share activities with friends on Facebook. If he accepts, the system allows his friends to view his actions through News Feed or Mini-Feed stories.

It seems eBay is planning to use Beacon so that eBay.com sellers will be able to choose to include their eBay listings in their Facebook News Feeds. This opens up a huge market sans geographical boundaries for the businesses. When it happens, eBay.com sellers would be able to drive potential bidders and buyers to their listings. eBay expects to make the feature available to sellers on eBay.com in early 2008.

“Beacon offers an interesting new way for us to deliver on our goal of bringing more bidders and buyers to our sellers’ listings,” said Gary Briggs, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, eBay North America. “In a marketplace where trust and reputation are crucial to success, giving sellers the ability to easily alert their network of friends – the people who already know and trust them – to an item for sale has the potential to be a powerful tool.”

Travelocity implementing Facebook Beacon on its website is an example of one the many success stories of Beacon. When Facebook users book travel on Travelocity, they can choose to share that information with their friends on Facebook.

“Travel is naturally a social activity that travelers enjoy discussing with the people they know,” said Jeff Glueck, chief marketing officer at Travelocity. “Using Beacon, Travelocity users can now easily choose to spread the news of their latest vacation plans on Facebook as a complement to their activities on the Travelocity website.”

Additional websites and companies participating in Beacon at launch include AllPosters.com, Blockbuster, Bluefly.com, CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com & Dotspotter), ExpoTV, Gamefly, Hotwire, Joost (News - Alert), Kiva, Kongregate, LiveJournal, Live Nation, Mercantila, National Basketball Association, NYTimes.com, Overstock.com, (RED), Redlight, SeamlessWeb, Sony Online Entertainment LLC, Sony Pictures, STA Travel, The Knot, TripAdvisor, Travel Ticker, TypePad, viagogo, Vox, Yelp, WeddingChannel.com and Zappos.com.

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P R Sai is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.