Google is holding its third Campfire One event tonight, this time to discuss the details of Friend Connect with developers.
Friend Connect is a new data portability initiative for spreading social connections around the web. It’s the third of such announcements to be made in less than a week; MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect are the other two.
Michael will be streaming the event live via Qik and sending us periodic photos from his iPhone.
We’ll update this post with the photos as they come in. The live stream is embedded below, and his archived video can be found here when he’s not recording.
More information will be available from Google at this URL following the event.
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And here’s a video provided by Google that explains how developers can add Friend Connect to their websites:
This is really cool. I checked the Press Release. It still sounds very vague, is there an example of how “Friend Connect” works.
Jesus Christ! Does this mean that Scoble will be dragging along his 5,000+ Facebook friends to every site he visits on the Web. God help us all.
The Plaxo Show
Nice undertakings.. congratulations to all…
good thing ning closed their round.
Just viewed the video, its gonna be big !
Sorry the video was cut short, Mike ran out of batteries on his Nokia.
Scoble’s resemblance to Philip Seymour Hoffman in the third picture verges on the uncanny
Google campfire looks to me like Google Timewaster TM Beta v.01
I stopped it before I was going to ask for the 25 minutes back.
We’ve been beaten over the head with XML exported data from social networks for the past year now.
It’s funny hearing that product manager guy in the demo video acting all hip with the “EVAR” and the posting of pictures of those who “got a little over involved last night”
The model of data portability + the concept of a digital lifestyle aggregator has the strong potential of disrupting the pay-to-respond dating subscription model that currently supports Match, eHarmony, Yahoo Personals, etc.
Imagine a world where you can roll up your profiles to create a comprehensive view of you: myspace + facebook + linkedin + disclosure of my dating nick name & service. All contact done outside of the dating services for free.
Powerful - disruptive - user centered
This seems much more promising than Facebook Connect, and has the potential to be very disruptive. If does a few things right, and some wrong, which will undoubtedly be corrected.
1) Uses OpenID, oAuth, Yay, but single-signon from AOL, Yahoo too
2) Integrates not just with OpenSocial, but Facebook as well. A walled garden (Google only containers) would have meant people would have to install both Friend Connect AND Facebook connect on their web pages.
3) Requires zero programming to start. This will help it spread like wildfire. Low-level data API missing, but that’s too much work for the gazillions of websites that will embed Friend Connect.
4) Runs any OpenSocial app from any OpenSocial container on any website
What’s missing:
5) Low level API for developers who to manipulate social network data directly on their site, without writing an OpenSocial app. Google has no real reason not to do this, since unlike Facebook, their entire business model isn’t based on locking in social network data. If Google succeeds in disrupting centralized social network sites, but makes zero dollars from it, they’ll still be in good shape, whereas Facebook will be in very bad shape. More than likely, it’s OpenSocial partners that don’t want this.
The siege of the walled gardens has begun.
So if I’ve got a site that’s more of an application than a guac lover’s page, and I manage my own users within my application, can I still tie into friend connect? Their example shows the site owner pasting in javascript ala myspace widgets of two years ago, and then using a google control panel to manage the users.
Hopefully there’s an API that lets the site owner manage user data him/herself.
@Brian
I’d say the match/personals pay-to-respond model has already been disrupted. How many free dating apps are there on facebook? And off? Some that come to mind are plentyoffish.com and true.com
Anyone still paying for a dating site today either doesn’t know any better or is seeking to meet other people that pay for dating sites.
Wow ) I can now add comments widget on my guac lover’s site without programming this serious app, and even allow users to upload photos )
And the best part I can promote Google/Yahoo so users create accounts there.
That’s cool!
Useless for all the sites exept guac lover’s sites imho.
Well i am fascinated to see how this moves on…
@13 The reason to pay for a dating site is actually that females there don’t get a thousend mails a day that are rather hard to read, so a paying customer has better chances of getting some attention.
RESTful APIs would be much in need of… but this is good direction to be sure!
@12 I agree with the few of your points, especially #5.
Also I think this is going to KILL YELP. If I were them I’d be selling now!
Very cool. This is very disruptive… it is hard to imagine what shape this will take. Maybe this is too much… is there such a thing as being over-connected on the internet? Web 2.0 noise pollution, loss of intimacy?
This is a very interesting application of open social with federated authentication services. It basically turns a social network into a social service provider. Wow.. instead of creating/managing your own socical network using Ning, you can just outsource this service to Google!
I think Google should go a step further to create the “AdSocial for connect” service that automatically crawls and analyze the content of your pages and delivers social service gadgets that are relevant to your viewers and your site content just like AdSense for content!! So, even websites without a master can have this feature added automatically.
Google has a jump on others, but I think MySpace, Facebook, and others potential social service providers will have similar things up and running soon.
@Gleb / 14
I think I covered that when I said, “or is seeking to meet other people that pay for dating sites”
…which is also why some dating sites give a much better deal (often free) to women. Supply and demand…
the first thing i will do is to post ad via the pic uploading.
The Google Link is now live for Friend Connect.
For what I’m interested in doing, the MySpace announcement was a dud, and unless there’s something nice waiting in the Friend Connect details that hasn’t been discussed, that’s a dud too.
That leaves Facebook Connect. Something tells me they’re going to at least get it much, much more right than MySpace and Google did. They do have the track record of their api over a year ago, and their platform a year ago.
cool
Here’s the trouble with Friend Connect: How creative can a host site be with the technology? Not very. There’s nothing to tinker with - you just embed stuff. The application developers have some room for creativity, but the host site developer doesn’t.
To Charlie@24,
Do you mean this product favors slideish company over facebookish company?
to Charlie@24,
False. They could create an OpenSocial app specific to their site. This would be just as easy as doing anything that talks to the Facebook or MySpace APIs.
@a, I see your point. I suppose you’re using your creative powers as an opensocial app developer at that point. Interesting…
Also, Google lets the site owner see his/her users in a dashboard on google’s site, yes? I wonder if there might be a GData api for this data? (They have GData apis for everything these days.)
google doc users vs facebook users. Hmm who should I want on my site aimed at the Y-geners.
Nice features. Kudos.
My video didn’t run short and I had a better position on the lawn. I guess TechCrunch doesn’t let you post things with URLs in them. Click my name instead for the full video.
Looks very cool. I just signed up. I know this sounds really stupid but I like the fact that there signup form is a Google Spreadsheet Form!
Love the idea of having my friends and community on my site rather then having them on Nings server!
Looking forward to hearing Steve Gillmor, Chris Sadd and the Gangs thoughts on it when they do the next gang!
Molly
@30 –
I think it (still) does — http://qik.com/video/77213
Yes, it’s really does!
I’ve changed my mind. At first it was great but now I think that this is just a little bit more advanced than the MYBLOGLOG website. Think about it, there you can add people, you can invite, you can add your visitors to your web site, you can customize the design and so on.
Hopefully Facebook and MySpace will bring something new to this area.
Such interesting comments the best I can do to add to the debate is forward you guys this:
http://gigaom.com/2008/05/12/p.....cial-graph
Is Scoble throwing up some type of gang sign in that pic or giving us a preview of what he looks like on the the crapper? Or maybe both!
WEST side!! /plop
Wow ) I can now add comments widget on my guac lover’s
super fany
My web like > >
دردشة
شات
This is not gonna work. Not simple enough.
Am I the only one who is aware of what Google is trying to do here? This is an obvious attempt by Google to collect everybody’s social network data, preferences, etc, and use it for it’s ad serving via Doubleclick, Google Adsense, Google Search, their YouTube, etc. When they have user preference data, data from Google Analytics, and can then serve the ads based on that across the Web, why would any advertiser buy ads from someone else?
Well I was trying to signup for LimeAll and I got this error:
Lately I see Google doing things in haste and not in the right way…
Something bad happened. Don’t worry, though. The Spreadsheets Team has been notified and we’ll get right on it.
Really not that impressed. “Web masters” still have to place the code and setup the site. I think people underestimate the level of intelligence of the public. Yes, a very simple todo, but you would be surprised with the amount of people who want a website who could never even ftp a file. It was stated, “not simple enough”, which I agree with. I’m going to try with a few of my sites, but in general, I’m not blown away. I don’t think its a Ning killer or a Yelp killer. Yelp? Who are they?
Google approach seems quite good to help small and medium websites.
For the user it is also good because you would not need to register to each of the forums, websites or blogs you visit. This is the closest we can get to a “single sing-on” for web applications.
While MySpace and Facebook provide APIs aiming at enriching their existing profiles, Google is providing easy tools for small and medium websites to benefit from Social Networks and drive more traffic to them. Many small & medium websites use Google AdSense to manage their advertisement. Therefore the more traffic these tools drive, the more ads that Google will place in these sites. It is a win-win. Google wins, the small website win too, and the user hopefully wins too by dealing with less userIds and passwords.