A battle has been brewing for months now: Google and Facebook both want to be the social layer that sits on top of every site on the Internet. So far, at least in mindshare, Facebook has been winning this battle with Facebook Connect. Google’s offering, Friend Connect, is the sibling that gets no respect. But that could change starting today with some new features and functionality.
There are actually a number of new or tweaked features in Friend Connect, but the overall gist of the changes is that they will allow site owners to offer a more personalized social experience to their visitors, while making it easier for visitors to connect with each other. “Normally we do one feature at a time, but this is a set of features,” Friend Connect product manager Mussie Shore tells us, noting that this is a special launch to his team.
The key to the new functionality for site owners is being able to get more information about their visitors. For example, depending on what Friend Connect widgets you install, you can have a questionnaire that comes up the first time a user shows up on your page and signs in with Friend Connect. This may sound like it would be annoying to a visitor, but assuming you don’t install it as a giant overlay when people first hit the site, it could actually be very useful for both parties. Site owners will be able to target content to visitors based on these answers. And visitors will be able to find other like-minded Friend Connect users that also visit that site.
Site owners will also be able to use this data to create personalized newsletters. And perhaps most importantly, they can also use it to serve up better ads from AdSense. By knowing some of your interests, Google can obviously go beyond just contextual ad serving. So naturally, this information is also useful for Google as well.
But from a social perspective, this is really about using all of this data to build out Google’s social layer. With it, Google can do things like build different social profiles for you on different sites (depending on that site’s content). The goal with that is to encourage users to interact more — you know, like on a social network, like the one that has the rival connect product and 300 million users.
But some of Friend Connect’s new interaction methods sound a little clumsy (though we haven’t tried it out since it’s not live yet). Basically, if you see a user who is a member of the site you are currently on, you can click on their face and get an option to message them. Doing so will share your email address with them, and if they choose to respond, they will obviously share their address with you. The idea is to foster communication even outside of Friend Connect, Shore says.
Staying true to its goals from Friend Connect, Google has also created APIs for all of its new features, to allow third-party developers to tinker with things. But for the more casual users, which Shore says make up most of their overall community, Friend Connect offers a very simple way to do installations.
Google will also package all of the data it gathers from Friend Connect to give it back to the site owners in useful and interesting ways, such as overall stats and graphs. When I asked Shore about the privacy implications of this he replied that they’ve been telling the partners they’ve already started working with on this to “think of it like tweeting.” The idea there is that any information a user puts into Friend Connect is public.
So will this shift mindshare away from Facebook Connect and towards Friend Connect as the important social layer for the web? Not if Facebook has its way with the new Open Graph API in the works. Still, Friend Connect is no slouch. In the 10 months since it officially launched, there are now 9 million sites with it implemented in some way. This has led to Google seeing 500 million 30-day active users, with 2 users now joining every second.
[photo: flickr/ginnerbot]
1) 99% of Websites should use Google Friend Connect.
2) Google Friend Connect is more professional.
3) Google Friend Connect vs Facebook?
Google Friend Connect Wins!
Riiiight, Google should know 100% about 100% of Internet users.
Hmm, I see the benefits to site maintainers, but for the users? Not so much – and really? send emails to other site visitors? I really hope this is actually a form that mails to them, rather than actually making their address available.
Same here…
That is the whole point
If site owners have more tools to identify what their communities are interested in, they have more chances of implementing a solution that brings them more information about their audience thus giving them the chance to either re-orient their content or simply optimize their content to make users more happy.
I can see no real benefit as a user (apart from potentially better content — or spammier content) but as a site owner/maintainer/developer/whatever I’m greatly interested in knowing what my users are interested in
Messaging is mediated similar to how Google Profiles handles it. Email addresses are not available on profiles.
It is not user centric, It is Google centric & third party centric. I don’t understand why try to share email addresses with unknown people via a message exchange.
The nerd inside of me wants to use the service only on the basis that I’ll now actually have friends with benefits. Maybe I can start suing like the guy who sued Axe when I don’t get laid using this
There is clearly a desire for users not to have to re-register for every site they join. This is the core value proposition behind facebook connect, openID, myspace connect, and this google friend connect. There are huge usability issues here, like how to empower users to share only certain things on some sites, yet be able to share a lot more on others without having to reenter info over and over. It’s a security and most importantly, a usability challenge.
Users are laying the proprietary-based (facebook or google) roots of their identity deeper and deeper each time they use either connectivity function on a 3rd party site. That is a bit scary to me.
I only wish there was a more awareness of how powerful identity data is, and how much users should demand that they ‘own it’….and not google of facebook. I take it, one day, we will.
how it works
agreed. google is getting whooped, but this could potentially be a big step. if they can aggregate the information collected from different sites, they could potentially carry over to social data that epically successful approach they’ve taken with content — instead of trying to control it in a closed network (as AOL etc did with content, and as facebook has done with social data), they could outsource it to the web at large (a la AdSense partners). This is indeed the strategy Facebook Connect is taking as well, although if google can leapfrog it in terms of development flexibility, it may be able to marginalize the massive headstart Facebook gains from the its much larger internal repository of social data
Thanks for the goodness Google. Many are already getting annoyed with FB Connect users. Yes, no one takes Facebook Connect users seriously to begin with.
too little, too late
“too little, too late”
Couldn’t be further from the opposite. That is probably what people said when someone else entered into AOL’s territory, MySpace’s or Microsoft’s for that matter. It’s never to late…
Hi!
Thanks for the head up. this will be a great tool for me to check why my blog have a very high bounce. I am not a tech savvy but a high bounce from a visitor still a big concern for new blogger like me. Wish this will be happening soon.
Thanks.
I’ve been wanting to use the API for a while, I think it’s better than FBconnect because it let’s you sign in with more than just your gmail account.
But with facebook connect I can pull even more info from the user and serve my own ads.
I guess the system you choose depends on the type of website you want to make.
BTW, another alternative worth checking out is RPXNow.com , it integrates ALL login systems you know, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, even you Wordpress.com account.
Google Profile did not beat Facebook. Google Friend Connect has its work cut out for it. But I am so glad they are trying. Competition is nice.
Its just another option . I will still use Facebook connect and now Google friend connect. The more th user options the better .
If there was a Nobel price for blog titling, you will win it hands down.
Apart from tech lovers and readers of mainstream tech mags, the average Joe has never heard of Google Friend Connect.
For them Google is a straight forward Search Engine that provides the most relevant Search data for Users.
Too much good stuff that Google is working on, is hidden inside the depths of their Website, with no clear reference to any of it on display across their main homepage.
Just recently Google did a series of outdoor billboard advertising to promote the full range of their Google Apps Suite.
Whilst this appeared to be a nice way of promoting Google Apps, I don’t understand why they didn’t also do a display Ad for Google Apps on their main Google homepage for a week.
Considering the huge online global audience that lands on Google’s homepage every day, they should learn to use that massive real estate to promote their latest Google wares for at least a week at a time.
I would like to see Google promote Google Friend Connect for one week on their main homepage, just to learn if this type of promotion by Google makes their hidden Products gain in popularity.
I love the fact that I clicked on Techcrunch’s FB Connect button to leave a comment here. Ha.
Yes I know that Google has designs on identity management. The nascent Google Profiles campaign certainly points to that.
That said Google is well behind the arc here…and this does not seem to be getting a “big push” either.
thanks,, i love this article..
Google has declared war to EVERYONE. From Facebook to Apple to Microsoft Office to Lending Tree to Amazon.com and the list goes on….
They are becoming more evil than Microsoft!
Just a tool to boost how many people are following your blog. There is a need to seperate what is social and what is personal. Hope google realises it.
Why doesn’t it create an Orkut friend connect instead???