Facebook has been testing an alpha version of their latest Facebook Connect library over the past couple months. The new library is supposed to simplify for developers the process of implementing Facebook Connect. Today Facebook is announcing “basic support for XFBML and an advanced data layer for optimizing FQL queries.” While David Recordon of Facebook demoed this to developers at the Washington D.C. developer garage last week, the latest library should make things much easier.

Keep in mind that the latest Facebook Connect JavaScript library is still in alpha mode (not even beta) so running this on a production site may not be the best idea. Facebook Connect has already been growing rapidly however there has been criticism from some about the ease of use in implementing the Facebook Connect service. That’s why Facebook has been working hard to upgrade their JavaScript Connect libraries.

Also of interest was a post from David Recordon announcing that they’ve implemented the new OAuth WRAP specification within FriendFeed. There are two interesting things about this. Most significant is that it appears Facebook continues to support FriendFeed. Secondly, FriendFeed appears to be serving as a testing environment for new authentication models before scaling it to Facebook.

While FriendFeed continues to have a thriving user base, it’s nowhere near as large as Facebook. The development team behind FriendFeed is world class however, and now Facebook will be able to try out new technologies without facing the technical limitations which Facebook’s 350+ million user base presents. If you’re like staying up to date on the latest web authentication models, you can check out some of the libraries reference in David Recordon’s blog post.