It’s always fun to hear what Google employees call various projects when they think no one is listening. In 2007 they called the upstart Hulu joint venture Clown Co. as a private joke about the messy start to that unlikely company (I was right there mocking Hulu with them, but later gave them their due when they failed to fail).
Now we’ve confirmed that inside the Googleplex their new social product, Friend Connect, is often referred to as “Friendsense.” Why? Because like Adsense, Google plans to use Friend Connect as a shoehorn to insert advertising onto third party websites.
Friend Connect was first confirmed in May 2008. Earlier this month it opened to all comers.
The product (see the video below) lets websites add social features to their website. Add a few lines of code and you can let users sign in through a variety of social networks. Websites can also add various widgets and applications through Google’s Open Social project.
Soon websites that use Friend Connect will have a new option – add Adsense-like advertising within the Friend Connect and Open Social widgets that they’ve added to their websites. Publishers will get a percentage of the revenue generated from the advertising.
And that’s the big monetization scheme behind Open Social and Friend Connect for Google. And that’s why they call it Friendsense internally. And occasionally let it slip to outsiders.
Great post thank you
MakesSense
I see what you did there ha! I suppose it’s obvious that they will go down this route. I don’t have a problem with it unless it becomes too intrusive and then I will just remove!
Just wait until the try to insert ads in our CommonSense.
@jake I doubt they will. CommonSense doesn’t have enough market share to make it worthwhile.
It’s AsSense you really have to worry about, what with all the inserting they’re planning with that one.
Ditto, thanks for the heads up.
We added Google Friend Connect to the Twitter Groups website and we are very happy with it thus far. I don’t think anyone will mind a little FriendSense added to it.
Not everyone knows that Friend Connect is, but it is picking up steam. Great product Google!
http://twittgroups.com
call me crazy, but I’m putting my money of Facebook Connect (notice what they use on the blog you/we are posting on?!)
That makes sense. Let’s see how Google effort to monetize social networks fare where others have failed.
Please, please do something about the human comment spam on this blog.
Failing that, perhaps someone could write a Greasemonkey script to filter out the noise.
How is your comment itself contributing to the discussion?
Good point, goes for yours too. I’ll just stop reading comments, good ones included.
That’s the effect of comment spam.
I’ll write a book called “How to recognize Michael Arrington Posts from 100 miles.” (i didn’t say i don’t like your posts)
Not really making sense to me. I think using adsense to monetize friendconnect is a bit eyebrows-rising. Not to mention that not everyone will install google friend connect, further enabling friendsense where they can/may have already separate adsense.
I just found it hard to believe that gfc was built just to be monetized that way. I rather believe it as a branding strategy.
Mike – thanks for all your posts. You really work your butt off.
So now having friends actually pays off.
The evil empire of google marches on relentlessly. Next what, FamilySense, StudentSense, SchoolSense, TerroristSense.
And Google gets praised for everything. I guess nothing succeeds like success.
Cool post . Those boys at Google don’t sleep . They are thinkin daily …hmmmmmm
Imagine google throwing ads on google earth, mars & moon in the centuries to come, when man settles there…:P
cheers,
Marvin
http://www.latticepurple.com
This makes absolute sense. Who doesn’t remember the days when Google was just a search engine and you wondered how they could offer up such a useful service for free?
The problem with friendconnect is that unlike other gadget/social-systems, you can’t use it as a login system, generating duplicity of logins… not very smart to be Google.
Like Toni I fail to see, why and how this would be implemented.
First of all, as an owner of a website, I already have the option of using Adsense.
In addition, I think ads in Friend Connect would seem too intrusive to bloggers and/or users of Friend Connect.
I really think Googles primary purpose with Friend Connect is to encourage the use of their other services.
Second of all, I don’t see a lot of options of wedging in Adsense ads in the use of Friend Connect, I have seen so far.
I may have the wrong glasses on, but this article lacks some specific examples, if I’m to be convinced
if this is accurate, then i’d say Google is missing the bigger picture here.
the opportunity with universal auth/login + portable friends list isn’t to simply jam more advertising into the UX — the real pot of gold is in using social networking distribution mechanics (aka viral) to increase avg transaction size at point of purchase.
the resulting boom in “social commerce” should provide a significant monetization opportunity — perhaps more for Facebook than for Google, if their only goal is advertising.
we shall see.
The problem Dave is that it isn’t a universal login system… it’s not!
anybody who has 50-100M logins or more is universal enough to be relevant.
Google, Yahoo, MSFT, AOL, Facebook, MySpace, Apple, Amazon, EBay/PayPal definitely all qualify in that regard.
any of these platform vendors could offer a login/auth service (and some of them do). however, most of them haven’t really developed or evangelized the services much.
Facebook, MySpace, & Google are each doing interesting things, altho at the moment i’d say FB is the best implemented example so far. we’ll see how Google & MySpace do in the coming year.
This might work or this might flop. How many ways can you shear sheep? I was going to put gfc back on my site but now I might just wait to see …
It only shows how primive Google’s vision of the web is: eveyrything boils down to add serving.
To be fair, neither Yahoo nor MS have any better ideas.
But from Google, as the leader, we could expect more.
And what we get is yet another technology, probably quite advanced, serving only one purpose: serving adverts, and disguised as a social network.
It’s disappointing.
in early days of adsense google and website owners made good money with it, but after sometime all users learned not to click on those Ads by Google, new ad formats and appearance on friend connect widgets will bring huge quick cash to google and website owners, but after sometime, again, users will learn that those are just ads and wont click on them. then google will invent something new
history repeats itself huh :
It sounds like a great idea
I’m surprised their ambitions could be so simple as more Adsense.
I doubt that Larry and Sergei think so simplisticly about it, but with their need to focus on leveraging their cash-cow, I guess it could make sense.
“Publishers will get a percentage of the revenue generated from the advertising”
…What about a developer rev-share?
and the point of this post is…
obviously Google would try to monetize its applications and tools..
Very interesting.. Does anyone know of a company working on an ad-free version whereby sites can pay a small fee to have the same functionality?
The internal name is actually “PeopleSense”.
I’ve heard this as well.
http://timothys.../#comment-54005
where would google be without adsense. It must be the best thing that ever happen to them. But hey sooner or later people will get sick of seeing these ads.
meh.. seems like a stupid monetization idea.
**breaking news**
the online personal health database google has been developing is known internally as HealthSense.. it sends you drug advertisements based on the type of diseases listed in your history.
**end breaking news**
NonSense
OMG YOU ARE SO CLEVER!!1!
You so lame.
I hate to Google, I hate it
They rich, you not.
stop being a dick you loser!
The problem with this story is that Arrington is wrong, his “confirmed” source is wrong, all the more to doubt future TC “scoops”
“FriendSense” is close, but wrong.
The Javascript source code for Friend Connect actually gives away the real internal code name, see this thread for details: http://groups.g...38cda9bbcc54cfa
So it’s PeopleSense. Yeah, Mike really botched this one.
Sounds too familiar with other products in the market, like: JS-Kit, Disqus, SezWho and so on… they all offer “social” abilities to your site, and now google wants some part of it too.
As other’s have noticed, what we really call it at Google is PeopleSense and the reasoning was that it is very analogous to AdSense. In AdSense, you add a bit of Javascript to your site to get ads. In PeopleSense, you add a bit of Javascript to your site to get people/social.
Sorry to say it’s no more complicated than that.
thanks for weighing in with the real story Joe.
btw, would love to see you blogging more about where Google is headed with OpenSocial / PeopleSense / other topics. i’m sure it would add a lot of weight & credibility to Google’s plans to hear your perspective.
(mike: you might want to update the article to reflect Joe’s comment… that’s about as official as you can get)
It’s a sad reflection on “all of us” that the truth twisted always makes bigger “news”.
This is the one aspect of the “social web” that makes me more than a little nervous, and will undoubtedly provide a massive sting in the tale.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. One day we may see Goog under antitrust case?
It’s a kind of inside news only a site like Techcrunch can come up with. For all those people wanting to know why is TechCrunch so popular…here is one of the reasons!
Hey, they may as well leverage their “-sense” branding, than entertain the inevitable comparisons with Facebook Connect..
1. google had one good idea-search,Pretty much everything else they’ve done has failed. This is yet another example.
3. Google laying off 10,000 contractors=business model is failing.
4. People are figuring out that no one clicks on google ads, and the price of their stock is reflecting that.
Tried GoogleFriends on some website … not working well with ‘invite friends’ feature.
Tecnologia Italia
http://www.tecnolgiaitalia.eu
Once again, we have Michael sensationalizing a non-story… although you gotta hand it to him for sucking in readers. First, get the facts right… they were kicking around the name PeopleSense… but that has been pointed out already. Second, “…use Friend Connect as a shoehorn to insert advertising onto third party websites…” makes things sound way more evil than they are. Everything that Google monetizes is through advertising… Friend Connect doesn’t change anything, Adsense is still their model, only it will soon be better targeted to site users in conjunction with Friend Connect by allowing Adsense to better understand how users are behaving on said ‘third party websites’… this is mutually beneficial to both Google, and site owners that use both services. Now someone tell me why this is a story that gets onto the second page of Digg?
where would google be without adsense. It must be the best thing that ever happen to them. But hey sooner or later people will get sick of seeing these ads.
great idea
And that’s the big monetization scheme behind Open Social and Friend Connect for Google. And that’s why they call it Friendsense internally.
thanks
stop being a dick you loser
Looks like TC needs to add a “Report Spam” button to the comments ASAP.