Google Friend Connect Makes Any Site Social
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Written By Drupad Sil | May 12, 2008 | Share This
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Last week we discussed MySpace’s move to position itself as a central web hub by allowing the portability of user data to a host of other social networking sites. Facebook quickly responded with Facebook Connect and its partnership with Digg, and today Google has revealed a similar feature, aptly called Google Friend Connect. From the release at the
“Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social – and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming – picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sits on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.”
Naturally, in the end this move is all about controlling user data, despite what Google may claim about liking a healthier Web for everyone. We spoke to this a couple weeks ago with this post on Google locking in user’s files and preferences data, another form of control. This slew of announcements shows that these companies are rushing to be that one website that users choose to store their data at and export it from. Unfortunately for Google, they don’t have the millions of user profiles that Facebook and MySpace do simply because they aren’t a social network (outside of Orkut), but this may not as limiting as it appears at first glance. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch explains why:
“Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contrast, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it. That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.
But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want access to their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network.”
It’ll be interesting to see which of the Big Three is able to become central for more people, but if Google manages to stay in between Open Social and end users, they may turn out to be the big winner, again.
Topics: Facebook, Google, MySpace, Open Source, Social Media |
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[…] Google Friend Connect Makes Any Site Social19 hours ago by Drupad Sil Facebook quickly responded with Facebook Connect and its partnership with Digg, and today Google has revealed a similar feature, aptly called Google Friend Connect. From the release at the Google Press Center : … - […]
Google is commoditizing social networking and creating more inventory for its ads by helping small websites/publishers gain social networking features for free. In the near future, social networking destinations like Myspace and Facebook will be worth a whole lot less. The data gathered on all the small distributed websites enabled by Friend Connect will be valuable because Google can serve relevant ads against that data.
Friends connect is a great addition to the social arena, many websites are taking the advantage and suddenly seeing large number of vistors to their sites. You can see friend connect enabled sites at http://www.gfcdirectory.com which is a new free directory for friend connect websites to be listed.