Heard about Facebook Connect? If not, and you're a mobile games developer or publisher, it's time to bone up on it.

In short, Facebook Connect is about opening up Facebook's innards so that users can access their friends through any website. So I might be on Amazon, and can see what my Facebook friends have been buying, or what they've been Digging on Digg, and so on.

But here's the thing. Facebook is going to launch a mobile version of Connect too. According to GigaOM, "instead of just technical protocols, the company is going to give out the entire code so people can drop it into their application".

This could be huge for mobile gaming. And I'll tell you why.

One of the current problems with connected mobile games (beyond the standard technological barriers, obviously) is the fact that it's generally about playing against a big wodge of people you don't know, rather than a smaller group of friends you do know.

I've harped on about this before, in an 'I don't care if I'm 16,678th in the world at a certain mobile game, I want to be top among my six close friends' style.

The problem is this: how to make these kind of ultra-localised friend rankings happen? Yes, I can kinda do it on N-Gage, if they tell me their player name so I can add them. And it's theoretically possible even for Java games.

It's just that nobody's doing it. This is where Facebook Connect could come in.

To take one example: EA Mobile's innovative Spore Origins, which is coming out in September with a nifty asynchronous online battle mode.

How cool would it be if when I first logged into the game, it connected to Facebook and figured out which of my friends also had the game on their phones, before creating a special league table in the same way that online Facebook games do?

This, at least, is what I assume is capable with the mobile version of Facebook Connect, when it's released.

Proper friend rankings based on my existing friends on Facebook, rather than forcing me to create them manually by finding out friends' aliases on each game and adding them that way.

How about N-Gage? If Nokia integrated Facebook Connect into the N-Gage client, it'd be much easier to add my real friends to my N-Gage friend list - maybe tied in with a neat Facebook (web) widget to show off what I'm playing on my profile.

All this is speculation on my part, based on a brief announcement of Facebook's plans. It seems likely the earliest impact will be for the most popular Facebook games to get connected iPhone versions.

But to get back to what I said at the start of this piece: if you're a mobile games developer, it's surely worth investigating what Facebook Connect is, and how it'll work on mobile.

Connected mobile games that leverage my existing social network could be a big leap forward for this industry.