[jgilliam]

You can get some small amount of information about a person via Facebook publicly, but to really get at all the info, the user needs to authorize their Facebook account to the app. Zynga and Slide have tens of millions of people who've done this for their apps, if not more.

All Google has to do is put an ad on all the Zynga and Slide pages that passes them the Facebook UID of the current user, and it could become part of their ad targeting. Then they can get the actual Facebook data from Zynga and Slide.

Google wants everyone to give this info to them directly, that's what Google.Me, Google Buzz, and all their different social experiments have been about. But that hasn't been working out so well, so these deals are a cheap way to make sure they can still get at the Facebook profile data.