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Yesterday Google announced a new social network tool called Friend Connect. Google suggests that every blog owner in her right mind will want to add Friend Connect to her blog. What is Friend Connect, and do you want to use it on your blog?
Here's Google's PR about Friend Connect:
With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Musician Ingrid Michaelson got her site ready in advance of the announcement, and the Google press release sent people there for an example of how it works.
To illustrate, independent musician Ingrid Michaelson has added music features from iLike with Google Friend Connect and is now able to run the iLike OpenSocial application on her official website. As a result, fans who visit Ingrid's site can connect with their friends without having to leave the site. Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles, see who is attending concerts, and enjoy other features of the iLike application, all at Ingrid's website. With Google Friend Connect, people will be able to enjoy their favorite features with their friends on any website across the web.
If you click the small sign in link at the top of Ingrid Michaelson's home page, you sign in to Friend Connect using a Google ID or an other Open ID.
For the user, it's like taking all your friends from Facebook, MySpace and other social networks with you whereever you go, provided the site you visit is using Friend Connect.
For the blog owner, you get more traffic and increase the engagement of your visitors with almost no effort on your part. The question is, do you want to do that with your site?
Charlene Li, in her Forrester blog Groundwell, comments in Google Friend Connect -- making open social easy,
One question I'm hearing is why Friend Connect is being announced now, especially on the heels of MySpace and Facebook announcements last week. Google is tapping into the "all things social" heat of the moment, but it's adding a different perspective -- not as a data source and social network "owner" but as an enabler. It's played this role well in the past with search and mapping APIs but make no mistake -- Google wants to spread its tentacles into the social Web.
The biggest buzz right now about social networks is not about them becoming more open, but about how they can't make money. I expect that at some point in the future, participating sites will have the option of enabling monetization engines via AdSense that tap into the deep profile and user data flowing through Friend Connect -- all done, presumably, with clear user approval and transparency.
Another blogger mentioned AdSense and how Google plans to use it. At Startup Chatter, Donna Bogatin talked about what this new service from Google is going to do to Ning in her post Google Friend Connect Rains on Ning $500 million Social Network Parade.
The Google FREE call to social network action, for each and every Website in the world:
"Easily insert social features to make any app, any site, any friends, a reality…Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social, and now they can be: Any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network."
WHY is Google being so benevolently free with its latest “free” service?
David Glazer, Google: "When more people use the Web, more people see the ads that Google runs on Web sites."
Laurel Papworth agrees with Donna Bogatin. She said on Twitter (where she's SilkCharm) "I think Google Friend Connect just blew Ning out of the water - if not Facebook? Any app, any site, any friends."
I don't see the connection mentioned on Startup Chatter. Ning provides you with a complete social network site. This is different from giving you a way to add some social networking among friends to an existing site that isn't necessarily already a social network. I'm not sure Google is really raining on Ning's parade. Maybe they are. What do you think?
Corvida, at
