Google introduces FriendConnect, watch out Facebook!
Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), 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 sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.
Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.
“Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social,” said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”
[via: Google]
May 12th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Oh kiff! A social network for social networks!
This is the epitome of unified communication trends and the major shift towards convergence! Google has taken fad, added a theoretical equation for convergence and came up with this.
There is NO doubt that this will be HUGE!
I love it already :)
May 12th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
That’s exactly it, they’ll connect everyone and anyone into one gigantic social network!
I agree, this is going to be absolutely massive, go go google!
May 13th, 2008 at 10:31 am
I don’t know, Chris. I finally got to watch the google video now that their friend connect web page is up again, and a whole bunch of problems surfaced for me.
And just btw, it was an awful video. So awful, I found myself laughing at it. The presenter delivered a terribly boring monotonal presentation. It was like everything was a huge yawn for him.
I found it totally absurd that Google used as example a site constructed with DreamWeaver. That is so last century. Their example site had ZERO interactivity, being made in DreamWeaver. Visitors could read the site and that’s about all.
But what about bloggers? We have an awesome array of interactivity built in already.
So with google’s friend connect, I’m going to wonder whether I should leave a comment on the blog post or use the google thing to write a comment that my social network can see.
And then there’s site membership. WordPress already allows people to join, as do many other blog platforms. So now I have to join TWICE?
And what about space for all this extra google stuff? On the example site the google stuff took up a huge chunk on the right, but on blogs, we hardly have any space for all that crap.
Will this stuff get relegated to the footer where it will mostly go unnoticed and unused?
Lastly, I signed up and got told to wait for an invitation, so I can’t check out any of this first hand for myself, right now.
By the time, google gets around to extending me an invite, maybe an asteroid would have hit and wiped out North America and none of this will matter anymore?
I can only hope, I guess.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Not another “social network”. Heaven help us. No wonder I have to start using Roboform. Who on earth can remember al the bloody logins. It is time for me to become anti-social. Maybe it is away of collecting information for more unwanted advertising.
I really start to dislike this whole networking scene.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
@Richard – Nice review and I agree with a good number of your points. The thing for me is that Google has a great deal of information and is in a position to launch something which is incredibly useful. I use Google Search, Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Adsense, Adwords and a myriad of other services they provide and I am very happy with all of them and this is why something like this excites me. I guess we’re going to have to wait and see, as they say, ‘the proof is in the pudding’..
@Rustig – Social Networking is massive and if we didn’t have it, we’d wish for it, that being said.. I agree, there’s a huge saturation of platforms at the moment, but sooner or later there will be a massive merge or the likes and it’s when this happens that I feel an equilibrium will be reached, what you think?
May 13th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Ya know, Chris, I use a lot of Google products myself. I love gmail. I think Google docs is amazingly useful. I participate in Usenet discussions via Google’s groups. I almost exclusively use Google search. I use Google Reader to get my RSS feeds (stopped using FireFox for RSS).
The one thing I don’t ever use is Google’s Orkut. I signed up on it. I have a profile on Orkut, but no-one knows about it.
Google went and bought Orkut and did nothing with it. So that could be an indicator that they’re weak on social networking.
The other thing of Google’s that I don’t use is Google Photos. I think Flickr is better.
My social networking tool is FaceBook. I have a myspace login, but no profile. I don’t ever intend using myspace for anything.
Maybe when Google actually allows me to use their Friend Connect, I will become excited about it. I’m actually extremely miffed that they would announce this new tool and then not make it available to me.
If I can’t get easy access to it, then probably most of my visitors will not be able to either. That makes it a lame duck product already.
Have you watched their video? Major turn off. They need to REDO it, ASAP!
May 13th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Ah yes, Orkut.. must admit, I don’t play around there much myself either. I see where you’re going with this and I don’t totally disagree. I just have a feeling that Google will have realized the importance of this and therefore will be putting a great deal of time and resources into it, but that’s just my thought really :)
Hmmm, I sort of feel that I need to wait and see more before I get into a big discussion over this and shoot myself in the foot ;)
May 13th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Chris: Maybe my problem is that I am a bit tired at the moment with all the social networks. I agree that they serve their purpose. Maybe I am just to picky. Facebook for me is a place teenagers hangout and talk about everything and nothing. I do enjoy a bit of humour, but also for a network where I can have a decent conversation and learn something. Maybe they are out there. Places like Facebook is like a big stew and everyone has to eat from the same pot.
Really do not know. I hope something good will eventualy materialise from all of this.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
That I can agree with, the continual movement from one platform to another is getting very annoying, but this one is a bit different in that fact.
LinkedIn is probably the best place to actually hang out, if you’re wanting to stay away from silly teenagers :)
May 14th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Nothing against teenagers. Been there myself many moons ago. Maybe I will give old Google a chance.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Orkut doesn’t play much in the western space. It is HUGE in India and was bought because of its sheer penetration. You must remember that when it comes to a numbers game, when u have a market like India, it gives you access to 1/6th of the population. in June of last year, India had a in internet penetration of 17.11%, thats about 205MILLION users!
The only reason why Google would want to get involved in the Social Networking space, is to further its viewership. Market share in all other services are decreasing and a way to add a new advertising revenue stream is what they need! They might not be losing money, but losing market share is worse!