Facebook is becoming more like AOL. And I mean that in a good way.

This occurred to me when I read that Warner Brothers is adding Facebook functionality to its Blu-ray disks. Using BD-Live, a feature that lets the latest generation of Blu-ray players connect to the Internet, and new Warner releases, starting with “Watchmen,” users can set up a time when all their friends can watch the film and trade onscreen comments. (The friends, of course, also need to be on Facebook and have BD-Live players and a copy of the movie.)

There’s a pattern here. Products including the Nokia N97, Palm Pre, Microsoft Xbox, and soon Verizon’s FiOS TV service all have links to Facebook’s social network.

For a company trying to bolster its credibility or techno-hipness, one of the easiest moves right now is to link to Facebook. Think back a decade: if you wanted to legitimize your aspiring dot-com or your conglomerate’s new e-business department, the first step was to cut a deal with AOL.

The terms are different. AOL mainly got big checks. It also got the affirmation that it was indeed the Internet’s town square. Facebook mainly doesn’t get cash from these deals (or for much of anything it does). But like AOL, it benefits from the subtle message that anyone who watches movies or talks on a cellphone would want to link to Facebook.

Each of these deals, moreover, compounds Facebook’s central value proposition as the switchboard that connects all of your dealings with your friends.

Of course, many of these deals are more show than substance. And many product makers seek links to other trendy tech services like Twitter.

But I think the nature of these links, and how they are being used, helps us think about a question I keep hearing: Is Facebook past its prime? Some wonder whether it is beginning to sink into has-been land like MySpace and Friendster before it.

Technology (and media) companies do rise and fall in importance. So it’s ridiculous to say that Facebook will be around forever. But some companies reach an escape velocity that gives them a longer life in orbit. And I think Facebook has reached that speed. You can see it in the style — the way other companies glom onto its brand to assert their relevance. And also in the substance: if you like to chat about movies, it’s hard to imagine a faster way to bring an existing set of friends onto some Blu-ray social application than by linking it to Facebook. And every time someone makes a social application that is actually fun or useful, it adds value to Facebook.

It’s easy to dismiss AOL today. And indeed, early adopters always ridiculed AOL (at least as soon as they graduated from high school). But the company was enormously successful for much longer than many people expected. It delivered satisfying experiences to tens of millions of people; it defined the market for Internet advertising; it made billions of dollars in profit; and it gave its shareholders control of the venerable Time Warner.

Yes, AOL frittered away its leading position over most of the last decade, but Facebook’s owners could be proud if their company has the sort of run that AOL did. And even if Facebook achieves AOL’s level of market and financial success, it’s hard for me to see how Facebook even comes close to the dollars AOL was able to manage in both revenue ($9 billion in 2002) and market value ($150 billion at the time of the Time Warner merger).

Nonetheless, each new press release from a product or service that integrates in an interesting way with Facebook indicates the company has many more years before it, too, crashes into obscurity.