Google Turns To Twitter To Help Friend Connect Fly

Screen shot 2009-12-02 at 3.53.49 PMSomedays, it seems like Facebook Connect is slowly taking over the web. It’s becoming so ubiquitous that it’s more surprising now to find a site that doesn’t allow you to log-in with your Facebook credentials. Seeing this, Google has been taking steps to make its own similar platform, Friend Connect, more social. And today they’ve quietly launched a pretty big feature: Twitter integration.

Starting immediately, if a site has Friend Connect installed, a user can log-in using either their Google account or their Twitter account. And if they’ve logged in with their Twitter credentials, their username and profile picture are passed through OAuth back to Friend Connect. More importantly, it means that you can easily tweet with the click of a button (to invite friends to check out the site). And any comment they leave on that site can be automatically tweeted out.

The timing of this move is fairly interesting seeing as Yahoo just announced massive Facebook Connect integration. It’s also worth noting the Google rival Microsoft owns a small portion of Facebook through an investment made in 2007.

So will Twitter integration help Friend Connect spread the way Facebook Connect is? Probably not since Twitter has nowhere near the 350 million users that Facebook does, but this is a nice addition that certainly can’t hurt. We’ve been saying for months that Twitter should have its own “Connect” platform, which is sort of does in some ways, but this takes it a lot closer.