Distributing friend connections across the web has been quite a hot topic in the Web 2.0 community as of late. MySpace, Facebook, and Google have all come out with their own initiatives for sharing social graph data with any number of websites. And there appears to be a struggle over just who will ultimately control the aggregated data - if anyone.
So it may or may not come as a surprise that Gigya, a startup known for distributing widgets across social networks, blogs and other social media platforms, is getting into the mix by launching a service into public beta called Gigya Socialize.
I first heard of Gigya’s plans to invert social networking in February when it was called “Wildfire Social”. President Rooly Eliezerov described it then as “better than anything we’ve done so far”. He even conjectured that whoever owned the aggregated social graph could become the next Google…which is ironic in hindsight, of course, given that Google itself beat Gigya to the punch.
Regardless, Eliezerov insists that the announcement of Google Friend Connect doesn’t change Gigya’s strategy, and that Gigya Socialize is actually quite different in some ways. He points to two areas in particular: the availability of an API for seamless integration, and the ability to import friends from email contact lists.
Gigya Socialize can be implemented by websites in either of two ways. They can drop in a set of plug-n-play components, like a news feed or sharing panel, that are based in Flash and visually configurable. Or they can work with an API that provides a short list of commands for retrieving and saving user activity and friend data.
While currently you can only import friends from Gtalk, Orkut and (soon) Hi5 with Google Friend Connect, you can invite them from your list of contacts on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL with Gigya Socialize.
Gigya intends to keep a low profile with this social service. Branding on individual components is kept to a minimum, and users are only brought back to Gigya’s site for account management purposes. The Palo Alto-based startup has no plans to aggregate friend activity across participating sites in one FriendFeed-like hub.
As for monetization, Gigya is thinking about releasing support for inserting sponsored items into the news feeds of participating publishers’ sites. The idea is that advertisers would be able to broadcast their own users’ behavior elsewhere on the web as a form of lead generation. This functionality, however, would be entirely opt-in on the part of publishers.
No websites have yet to roll out Gigya Socialize, although EA Games is said to be working on an implementation and RockYou has shown interest as well.
cool.
bleh.
Gigya is one of the most promising startups today in the Social distribution world and I assume will be acquired sooner or later by Google. Good luck !
I wonder how many of these friend list aggregators will come up in the next while. Then we’ll need aggregators that aggregate the aggregated lists - wow - I guess I am jumping the curve…
Maybe I am just a fool and nobody outside Silicon Valley will ever understand this and so it won’t ever go mainstream… I wonder…
Also my Friends List or my Social Graph and Monetization are two things that don’t gel for me - and a lot of other people. Nobody wants to be monetized when they interact with their friends.
Maybe I am just very Peter 1.0 today.
“Gigya Socialize is actually quite unique”? “The ability to import friends from email contact lists”?
You’re kidding, right?
Seriously, guys. This is ridiculous.
Website owner wants to import contacts from e-mails and send invites to do so he has to send his visitors to sign-up on Gigya. As a surfer currently doesn’t have a Gigya log-in and doesn’t know what the hell is Gigya he doesn’t want to give them his/her e-mail password though he kinda trusts the website he uses.
So why should a website owner want to use Gigya?
Though for small websites that can’t afford an own solution to acess emails - it’s ok and could work.
How many friends does one need to be discovered or being connected to using these useless social networking sites?
Not. A. Chance. In. Hell.
How many different products like this do we need? I know competition is a good thing, but it seems like with all of these different ways of sharing data, the social networking scene is becoming more fragmented and confusing instead of brought together.
Social media features are just that, features for any website. Building the features in, etc., is fine but frankly, it’s the easy part. If the real value in all this is the user data–and I agree that it is–why would any serious web publisher hand that over to someone else? Where’s the value in having these features? Engagement? More pageviews? Yes, but without ownership of the social graph that’s all being plugged into an inefficient ad revenue machine. In otherwords, if I’m a publisher, why should I give away free real estate on my website for someone else to benefit? Is the ability to let my audience create a profile page worth that?
Peter 1.0 - great points - Gigya will aggregate any graph with an API - but certainly these are challenges any company faces when trying to incorporate these kinds of features.
Gleb - interestingly enough lots of people are already using Gigya to manage friend lists, on hundreds of sites, to facilitate content sharing - more than 40 million contacts currently are managed. To your other point, I think sites like the idea of working with a smaller company where they can potentially have some leverage in the relationship.
Does anyone else think that this sounds very similar to Gigli?
Branding on individual components is kept to a minimum, and users are only brought back to Gigya’s site for account management purposes.
I like this alot. I hate getting emails from myspace or facebook about messages. Why not let us read those messages right in my email, like any good forum software does?
Congrats for Gigya, they are growing very fast, competing in the “big league” of Web 2.0 social networks can be a hard job to do, they seem to manage themselves very well. I wonder if they will start to make money with their new advertising program. Gigya Socialize in a nice tool and I sure they will have great success with it.