South by Southwest (SXSW) 2009 is trendy, twitter-filling, and the source of increasingly social iPhone news releases. What’s going on this year?

FaceBook connect comes to the iPhone. Sure, they may just have redesigned their home pages to basically become Twitter with invitations to apps you don’t want and events on continents you can’t attend, but behind the scenes:

You can now use Facebook Connect on your iPhone in the same way you can for a website. Simply download any application featuring Facebook Connect and log in using your Facebook account from your iPhone. Then, you’ll be able to easily find your Facebook friends. They will be able to see the same profile information as they can on the site, controlled by your privacy settings. You can also share what you’re doing with your iPhone applications with all of your Facebook friends by publishing stories back to your profile.

Pelago has launched Whrrl 2.0:

an application for the iPhone that enables people to capture and share the moments of their lives, as they happen, as a story. Through location, photos and text updates, users can easily turn everyday life experiences into lasting stories that can be remembered, organized and shared. Each user controls exactly who can view their story, ranging from public to private, and includes the option to broadcast status updates on Facebook and Twitter.

SGN Launched Agency Wars, a game tied into — you guessed it! — social networking and Facebook connect!

Agency Wars is capitalizing on the classic spy genre and offeres massively multiplayer game play so you can become the most deadly spy around.

TUAW is also live and on location at SXSW 2009, and have posted up coverage of the iPhone Gaming Panel.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone at South by Southwest (SXSW) 2009 Roundup

iPhone users sure love them some Facebook. In just two weeks following the launch of Apple’s App Store, Facebook’s Director of Mobile, Jed Stremel announced that the Facebook App for iPhone has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times. Whether those are unique downloads, and whether all downloaders are now using it consistently aren’t known, but Facebook remains in the top-ten list for free apps and doesn’t look to be going anywhere anytime soon.

In fact, last week at Facebook’s f8 conference they announced Facebook Connect, a new framework that would grant other iPhone apps (and their developers) the ability to log onto and use your Facebook account data. Depending on your views about convenience vs. security/privacy, this means you will either enjoy a single and consistent presence across a wider range of apps (one account to rule them all), or be even more paranoid about your personal information getting out of your control (one point of failure to leak it all).

Personally, I have a Facebook account but only visit it when I get an alert or need some info. I have the iPhone app, but like the WebApp before it, find MobileSafari a good enough browser I’ll most often to just go straight to “just the internet” version. And while I’m all for “open social”-esque removal of walled gardens, I think it’s promoting a cavalier attitude towards privacy, and try to remind myself that you can never un-release information.

What about you? Do you use Facebook? Do you use the Facebook iPhone app? What do you think about the idea of Connect?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Facebook on the iPhone: 1M Downloaded, “Connect” Service Launched