Facebook has raised $100 million to buy more servers in order to help the site cope with an "explosive" growth rate.

The money is coming from a venture loan company TriplePoint Capital to expand the server farms that host the social networking site's content that has seen an increase from 32 million to 109 million users year-on-year to March.

This news comes as the site has launched Facebook "Connect" the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to "connect" their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site.

This will mean third party websites can implement and offer more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party apps today on Facebook.

Connect will let users connect their Facebook account with any partner website, appearing as their "real identity" including basic profile info, profile pic, friends and photos, using a trusted authentication method.

Facebook employee Dave Morin says in the company's news page: "These are just a few steps Facebook is taking to make the vision of data portability a reality for users worldwide".

"We believe the next evolution of data portability is about much more than data. It's about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings."

Facebook Connect will be available within the next several weeks, the same timescale as MySpace's recent "Data Availability" initiative, that means MySpace members will now be able to share their profile with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter.

>> Link - Facebook
>> Via - TheGuardian
>> News - MySpace "Data Availability"