Max Gladwell

Tech giants unleash a torrent of new tools and features aimed at socializing the entire Web

Last week, Facebook announced it would open its walls with Facebook Connect:

“Users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. It’s about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.”

MySpace made a similar announcement just days before. The doors will soon be open. And today, Google dropped Friend Connect into the mix. Whereas Facebook and MySpace were incremental steps, Google is shooting for an Apollo-sized advancement in socializing the Web. Get ready for lift-off.

“Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.

‘Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social,’ said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. ‘Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other.’”

Using a number of social standards, such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others, Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.

Here’s the basic pitch: Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites.

1. Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
2. Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
3. Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

The video below provides a simple tutorial. If you have a website–any website–you can can sign up for Friend Connect and add widgets that allow users to securely sign in, import their friends, write reviews, load photos, and more. Pretty much everything you do on a social network. These standalone applications run inside the widget windows, so they really aren’t running on your site. You’re just providing the portal, though you can customize the look and feel. The benefit in principle is that the presence of these features will bring more traffic and make your site more sticky, since visitors have more to do when there. And if you’re already monetizing your traffic through advertising, ecommerce, and/or donations, the presence of social tools should bolster that activity.

We’ve always maintained that social networking was a feature and not a product and that you have to provide a purpose beyond socializing if you’re going to build a viable (profitable) business model. Sites that integrate Friend Connect will be using social networking as a feature, leveraging the audiences that the big social networks have already aggregated. Meanwhile, Facebook and MySpace will continue to struggle with monetizing an audience that’s too busy socializing to pay attention to ads. The largest benefactors of Friend Connect would seem to be smaller sites with limited resources, such as nonprofits and startups. All of a sudden, a simple “About Us” page becomes a social venue in which to discuss issues, rate products, recruit members, share information, and attract support. Coupled with services like JustMeans, good2gether, Make the Difference Network, and other social media venues, and small initiatives can gain tremendous exposure.

As a user, you’ll be able to interact with your favorite websites in new ways, since any site with traffic becomes a de facto community. When it comes to discovering new sites, you can immediately engage without going through repeated profile-building gauntlets and trying to recall what username/password combination you used.

There is some danger in granting Google this much control over the social Web. However, as we’ve said in the past, the social Web is a highly open and fluid landscape. Despite its size and stature, it’s unlikely that Google will dominate here as it has with search…though this is as good an effort as any. We look forward to seeing how Yahoo! will answer and hopefully provide some balance to these potentially game-changing developments.

Friend Connect will be in a test phase on select websites for some time. We’ll continue to cover it and provide updates on its public beta release.

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