Google’s Friend Connect ; ‘the’ social networking friend finder

One problem with current social networks is that they require us to build social networks and interact with our ‘friends’ within the world built by the social network architects. These walled gardens may soon be a thing of the past as Google looks to open up the social web and let users interact with friends from any social network on the web through Google Friend Connect. With Friend Connect users will no longer need to create new accounts or build new friend lists when joining a site with a network application: They can simply socialize with their friends from their current networks on this one very site.

Social Web Concerns

Google’s main focus, as claimed by Friend Connect designer David Glazer, is to ensure that users are in complete control of their data. Google will not store any data retrieved from the users existing various networks when they log in to websites that use the application. As it is early days for Friend Connect, Google is still being very cautious about which sites they give permission to use the code.

Socialize My Site

Friend Connect has also been received as a very easy-to-use application for site owners. All that needs to be done to add the application to an existing site is to log into the Friend Connect Admin Site enter site details, select the various social apps you wish to have on your site, copy the code, paste it in and voilà you’re connected. There is no need for programming and sites can grab social applications in a matter of hours if not minutes. The different social apps a site owner can add include user registration, invitations, member photo galleries, message postings and user reviews increasing the user interactivity of a site instantaneously.

So Competitive

Current social networks Facebook and MySpace have also released similar services and may currently have the upper hand with strong strategic partnerships with other major websites and control over tens of millions of user profiles; not having an existing social network walled garden may actually have an advantage in the long run. They are effectively trying to create a social network of social networks and break down the restrictions that currently prevent internet users from having a continuous social experience across the entire web. In fact MySpace has joined Google’s Open Social Initiative possibly trumping out Facebook’s from the future of the social web (unless of course they too join this soon-to-be mega network). The fight for the control over the social web is going to be a fierce battle. There is a lot of money and power involved in socializing the web and to be the market leader in connecting individuals and websites on this level will be an extremely lucrative position; we just have to hope it won’t be abused by who ever wins.

Examples of sites testing Friend Connect: My Latest Piece, Guacamole, Ingrid Michaelson, BibleApps.

by Peter Jackson from 77Academy

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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