As we reported on Friday, Google will be launching its own data portability effort called Friend Connect. It will be announcing more details about the preview later tonight, but in a press release this morning it confirms:
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.
Friend Connect will work with existing standards such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with data access APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. The announcement comes on the heels of similar announcements from MySpace and Facebook (MySpace’s Data Availability and Facebook Connect). As Michael noted on Friday:
The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data.
Update: I was able to talk with Google engineering director David Glazer to get some more details. The point of Friend Connect, he says, is to “, give users a shortcut to connections they’ve built up somewhere else.” So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs (you choose which one you want to sign in under, with more options coming). Then you authorize the site to go out and retrieve your friend’s list from that network. Any of those friends who also happen to be members of the site you are on will then show up and you can interact with them.
Friend Connect is geared at the Long Tail of small sites that don’t even have any user information. It allows them to tap into bigger sites and piggyback on their user sign-in and registration, list of friends, and interactions between those friends. It takes advantage of many existing standards, including Facebook’s (it is not an official partner, but it Google is taking advantage of its published APIs). Of the many standards emerging, Glazer thinks that OAuth is the way to do it right.
Glazer admits that Friend Connect is but one small step towards the larger goal of being able to connect to any friend on any application, on any site. But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.
The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.
Basically, what Friend Connect does is gather this data from big social networks in whatever way they make available and then presents it in a uniform way to third party sites. It also works as a pass-through between those third party sites and the big repositories of social data. This eliminates any programming hassles on the part of small Websites that want to tap into these social networks, but it also positions Google as the central switch connecting all of these different identity systems.
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Bummer.
peace|dewde
@1 link isn’t live until after campfire one tonight…try reading.
Looks cool. I am looking forward to playing around with this later tonight.
Well be TechCrunch be implementing Friend Connect or a similar offering?
This is great news for all users! It won’t be long before data portability projects converge…
See http://traackr.com/blog/?p=31 for more.
Man I would love to have something like this on my site.. More interactivity makes a better community.
Hope the Wordpress guys would look into this as a plugin or so..
Sweet Google is embracing OpenID and the rest of the Data Portability pieces for this? If not then I’m going to hold out for Chi.mp. I’m pretty sure that Data Portability is vendor neutral which translates to user centric. There was a time when Data Portability was an initiative that would spawn from The Big Blue G
Did you hear that? That’s the sound of the death knell for Data Portability.org. Yahoo OpenStrategy, MySpace “Data Availability,” Facebook “Connect,” and now Google “Friend Connect” are all proprietary methods for accessing and using user profile, relationship, and media data…really, it’s just Google bundling these proprietary APIs together in a neat package for web sites. Yes, OpenID and OAuth may be used, but since the real data (e.g., profile and relationship data) that comes from Yahoo, Facebook, and MySpace is not accessed via APML and micro-formats, you really gotta wonder if this champions standards-based “Data Portability” while actually destroying any hopes for its success.
Also, since GOOG doesn’t have any profile and relationship data (i.e., Gmail and Orkut pale in comparison to MySpace and Facebook in quality and quantity of user data), you wonder if this data will all flow through Google, allowing them to replicate it and add it to your Gmail account?
All the social part like “user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.” remind me of mybloglog which allowed websites to become social by embedding their widget.
who controls the users ? If a site later decides to turn off friendconnect what will happen to the registered users ?
First OpenSocial and now this - another step in Google’s play to break the Social Networks’ walled gardens.
With Friend Connect Google gets the key to their next generation of search algorithms - Social Graph data.
For some odd reason I get 404 page but that does not mean it’s not going to work because usually Google redirects you to custom 404 page which in this case they haven’t done that.
Erick Schonfeld
Please check your seconds link again, I know it’s a quote but again see if you can find the right link.
Thanks for the post appreciate your guy’s hard work.
TTYL on twitter.
It’s time to “flip the model” from walled garden to open Social Web. Instead of widgetizing apps and bolting them on to some corporation’s proprietary social graph, why not widgetize the social graph and socially-enable any website or web page?
This is a great move by Google!
duh, once again this is something carpe said would happen almost a year ago…
http://tinyurl.com/3yhfra
It was already expected with Facebook Connect @ http://www.amitbhawani.com/blo.....rtability/
YEAH ! Finally somebody wakes up and smells the coffee! nice!
I have to admit that if there are several players in the field and Google joins the game, I will most likely go the Google route. Every other time I’ve switched from something to the Google alternative I have been more than pleased.
I’ll wait until I see the connection tool before I comment. Don’t people understand how much better the Internet will be if they are in control of their own data and that same data is based on open standards which can be equally utilized by all parties? Google has always taken the stand that although it’s not an open API, we’ll give you an export option. Will Friend Connect provide this?
From this point on I’m going to be very careful about which tools I use, and I hope others support open standards for user data and social graphs.
Yes, I agree with Sandra… Google never ceases to amaze! I seriously hope that a benefit from this new system is TWO WAY SYNCHRONIZATION OF CONTACT LISTS BETWEEN GOOGLE AND PLAXO!!!! Please!!!
This is great news for all networkers! Google bundling these proprietary APIs together in a neat package for web sites! The next generation of search algorithmus?
Gerhard Kaiser - Gogle me
OMG, they hit home with AdSense causing a mass number of spam blogs, now we get to look forward to every blog owner anywhere, creating a mini-facebook social type site and getting daily invites to hundreds of different sites. Wow, invite spam on steriods.
Nice one Google
Nice and superb — putting OAuth into official use, and OpenSocial into perspective!
@17 It’s okay if the API is not open, as long as I can export. I’d like to see open social made more open. I’m a big fan otherwise. I don’t like walled gardens. We are just now starting to see the power of openID with oAuth. I wonder if this app will ever use APML at all.
RDF and APML are two great buddies who haven’t had a chance to really get to know each other yet.
the link is not working
Google likes to release something quickly yet, they don’t have anything to show. This is worse than Microsoft announcing vaporware. Google just go ahead and publish something that doesn’t exist, yet make all these news that it exists.
Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you.
Interesting stuff…
Open standards are the way forward but they’re so slow to be adopted, I mean look at how messenger services such as trillian struggled to tempt people away from proprietary apps. Too many choices still but with Google’s weight behind the project it has real potential.
Yes, I want a USB token like the ones from Alladin, to lazy for passwords.
Sounds like this is a client-side widget providing a short-cut for accessing big social sites. A good step forward, but the problem is summarized well in Erick’s last statement:
“…positions Google as the central switch connecting all of these different identity systems”
“The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday).”
WTF? If I can’t mash up the data from Friend Connect with my own, what’s the point of this? User signs in to my site, and just sees a list of their friends from other SN sites? Either a) I don’t get it, or b) Friend Connect is useless.
I haven’t yet tried using OAuth, but OpenID is actually made completly user-unfriendly. It takes much more steps to login using it, then without it.
It should really move to one-click login and one-click sign-up + login on a new site showing which data the site wants to get from you.
@27
if we can get an iframe we can parse it and mash it up (the only question is if it would be ok by the terms). Parsing HTML into data isn’t actually much harder then parsing rss if you parse only one source.
Another website named Jumii.com has been working under the radar on a better app then Friend Connect. A year and a half into development they are almost ready to open the doors. Currently they are in private beta. Expect to hear a lot about them in the coming months.
I’d go with Facebook or Myspace and especially Yahoo (almost everyone I know got a YIM account). Orkut pale in comparison.
“The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications.”
Sent through an Iframe. Am I missing the point.. . This is ridiculous, and quite possibly one of the most useless ideas I have ever heard in my life. Who wants to log in to all these different networks just to see there friends or contacts list for all these sites. The site implementing this, can’t even do anything with it. Please google go back to the drawing board, and make something useful. This is a big pile of fud, and does nothing.
You can listen to the press call here - http://readwritetalk.com/2008/.....ence-call/
I wonder about how much website owners will really want to allow their users to disappear off their site into google realm. maybe I just misread it…
duh..Techcrunch is going to incorporate this, and with the new script running, its going to load even slower!
A big “friend switch”
Ahh man, we need wordpress to make a Plug in, pronto!!!
Sweet stuff man.
I am looking forward to adding Friend Connect to my site, whenever it becomes available…but to Brig’s point, I have to wonder if the hosting website becomes irrelevant. It’s sort of like friends gathering/talking in a restaurant..It’s about the conversation, not the restaurant…However, I have to believe it is worth taking a chance with…
Everyone is missing the big point! Everyone has let the users down!
What we have here is failure to communicate, which is what we had last week, which is the way he wants it, well he gets it.
Natural evolution…(of OpenID + OAuth + OpenSocial)… just given a new name
The link not working? 404 ?
You guys retarded? It says hit that link after tonight
@John (on the topic of two-way sync between Plaxo address book and GMail contacts) — we’re working on it! Still a lot of testing and bug-fixing to be done, but it should come out within weeks.
Google is known for such path-breaking ideas.
I am really excited to experiment this technology with my web property
The cloud is becoming extensively enormous. Uncontrollable. THats the reason why I deactivated my Facebook account. It was overwhelming, and stopped being personal. I wonder where all this integration will take us. I think not far before it is all uncontrollable. Just like the passwords of the infinite acconts we already have.
Webring 2.0 ? Ahh, the good old days.
What if all of the data was compatible from site to site, what if everyone could come to the table and look at the standards. What if even Microsoft vigorously applied these types of data formats in its products.
I applaud Google for diving in with two very important specs, but user data needs to live with the user so that we can compare services based on their features, not the data that goes into them.
With an online application framework in place, Google has room to really take a stab at the rest of the specs, they are clearly setting the standards, but when you step into the realm of Data Portability, don’t reinvent the wheel with user preferences, I/O, or any other implementable portion of the framework.
For instance, APML could enrich the OpenSocial framework, even if Google could just make an API that could read the standard, they would get a lot of good karma, and users would be winners.
Yawn…. iFrames= wtf.
This is way too limiting for anyone wishing to build a site for multiple users. The only use this could possibly have would be on peoples personal websites where they do not want to provide others with any unique functionality and just want to be able to display their friends/comments from their friends on their site.
Dear Mr all staff and Derector google authority
by publishing ,friend connect, feature of social network and be able add for each websites, It is great for google progression, as I am real Indonesian, this market is ok especially in Indonesia, may be global comunity.
I hope Google as my wife I said it, able to give chance that I can be partnerships of google to sociallization of Friend Connect feature to all site in Indonesia,
but Google as you know Indonesia ,I dont accept credit card in my email but debit card, by this frienships google will be loved comunity of netter from Indonesia.
I am sure Friend Connect, as top solution to all each websites in Indonesia in making trafic of website and good web promotion
I suggest, Google beside Friend Connect please by Google kopi darat it is that mean ,there are realization face to face to join meeting as member friend Connect in Indonesia.
so this is touch in real people between Indonesian Comunity
Mohamad Sugiyono
experienced in internet more than ten year more,
live in jakarta ,bogor
Indonesia
I wonder how this affects AdWords and AdSense.