Google Friend Connect

Google Press Center: News Announcement: "Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. 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."

Google Friend Connect

Google Confirms Friend Connect

I was able to talk with Google engineering director David Glazer to get some more details. The point of Friend Connect, he says, is to “, give users a shortcut to connections they’ve built up somewhere else.” So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs


The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday).

Google Friend Connect Previews Tonight

The user experience is simple. When a user comes to a site in the Friend Connect program they can sign into any social network that is sharing their data. Their data is not actually shared with the site. Impressively Google is supporting OpenID and OAuth in addition to their own standard OpenSocial.

Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social

Those hard questions are the ones that these companies are supposed to be working on together through the Data Portability Working Group, though. The Group has published best practices documents tackling a number of difficult questions already.

Welcome to the social mess?

Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, OpenID, DataPortability: Managing a bunch of different log-ins and passwords suddenly seems easy and straightforward.

Heh, Interop dead. Backlash at 11.

Now we need a WWE-style smackdown between the beasts ...

Interesting times ...

Facebook Connect

Facebook Developers: "Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook."

Facebook Connect Pulls Back The Curtain: Data Portability: "As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date."

Buh? I don't see how that's going to work.

Funny, after this week I guess I'll have to traverse the social backwaters changing my quip ...

Why can't social networking sites bother to network with one-another? Are they that anti-social?
http://hownottoblog.com/index.php/2005/03/18/

As John McCrea says "What a Week!"

DataPortability - MySpace officially joins the DataPortability Project

DataPortability - MySpace officially joins the DataPortability Project: "We are excited that MySpace will join the rest of the community to continue the design, documentation and implementation of a set of best practices for inter-operable Data Portability between trusted applications and vendors."

MySpace joins DataPortability,: "Whilst a number of high-profile launch partners have been announced (Yahoo!, eBay and Twitter), it’s worth point out that access to this project will be available to everyone who agrees to the T’s & C’s."

MySpace's Data Availability is not Data Portability: “After this announcement I had the pleasure of speaking with a reporter who was on the briefing call. He explained that MySpace said that due to their terms of service the participating sites (e.g. Twitter) would not be allowed to cache or store any of the profile information."

Weird. At least MySpace has lots of good data to throw around. Heck, I'd be happy with just basic profile data onto a handful of sites.

Funny that DataPortability uses Tumblr for a blog, but, a nice way to round up the coverage.