Facebook’s Director Development Network Ethan Beard took the stage at the Le Web conference in Paris to talk about the status of Facebook Connect.

Beard’s talk focused on the notion of identity as defined by connections – to people, things, places, etc. “We aspire to be a technology that people use to connect to things they care about no matter where they are,” he says.

More than 80,000 websites and devices (including iPhone and Xbox) have implemented Facebook Connect since it launched in December 2008, says Beard. And more than 60 million Facebook users use Facebook Connect each month. And it’s not just a lot of small sites using the product. Two-thirds of comScore’s US Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect. And some of these sites are even bigger than Facebook (perhaps not for long though).

Sites like the Huffington Post have seen a 500% increase in Facebook referrals after implementing Facebook Connect, says Beard.

500,000 applications have been built on Facebook, says Beard. Facebook has been surprised by the growth of social gaming (playdom, Zynga, Playfish, etc.). The growth has just begun in social gaming, says Beard.

Beard also says over 70% of Facebook users are from outside the U.S.