The barricades around social networking sites are at last crumbling as all the major players bring out their demolition crews. First MySpace announced data portability, then Facebook announced Connect, and now Google on Monday got dressed its own hard hat in the form of Google Friend Connect, promising regular Web sites to join the social-networking trend.
Many social networks offer all-powerful systems for linking people and information, but their benefits are limited to those who sign up with one service or another. For example, a Facebook user cannot use her content or friends on LinkedIn or any other network.
That may transform shortly with top social networks Facebook and MySpace — as well as Google — all promising to enable data portability.
MySpace last week announced its “Data Availability” initiative, shortly to be enforced by partners’ eBay, Photobucket, Twitter, and Yahoo, to make it easier to share social data across Web sites. It also joined the DataPortability Project, which counts Google, Facebook, and Plaxo as members.
Facebook the next day introduced “Facebook Connect,” a new iteration of the Facebook Platform that allows third-party sites to “‘connect’ their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site,” as Dave Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook, put it in a blog post.
“At present, these efforts remain works-in-progress, and it may be several months before social data percolates out across the Web unhindered. But the message is clear: The era of online walled gardens is over.”
Eventually, each one has announced new data portability initiatives making it easier to exchange profile information, make friends, and interact from one social networking site to other web sites.
Google Friend Connect, accessible Monday evening, lets site creators add a code snippet to become Friend Connect-enabled, allowing them the ability to add user registration, invitations, a member’s gallery, message posting and reviews, as well as third-party applications built with Google’s OpenSocial API technology, the company said.
In a statement, Google engineering director David Glazer described Friend Connect as part of a developing set of applications like “OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace” that aims to standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and data.
“The Web is getting better by getting more social. We have baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site,” Glazer said. “Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app.”
“What Google is basically doing is making it easy to tap into new, emerging standards around social features,” explained Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li in a blog post. “These standards specifically deal with identity (OpenID), data access rights (OAuth), and social applications (OpenSocial). These are all standards that have emerged in the past six months and are setting the foundation for open social networks. Friend Connect is Google’s way to make these new standards more accessible to Web site owners who do not have legions of developers at hand.”
Friend Connect-compliant sites will be able to view, invite, and interact with newfound friends, or with existing friends, from established social-networking sites, including Facebook, Google Talk, Hi5, Orkut, and Plaxo via secure authorization application-programming interfaces.
At present only a few sample sites, including Google’s Guacamole site, are accessible to end users. “We are waiting to get feedback from Web site owners about what kinds of sites and apps they want,” Glazer said.
Google demonstrates the power of this latest application with the website of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson, who used Google Friend Connect to embed music features from iLike into her site. Once Google Friend Connect goes live tonight, Michaelson’s visitors will be able to see comments from their social networking friends, who are going to one of Michaelson’s concerts, add her music to their profiles, and more without having to visit iLike’s site.
“We want to make ourselves visible to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us,” said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. Indeed, the next evolution of social networking has been marked as the liberation of data onto the rest of the web.
In spite of of all the chatter of open platforms and portability, it is clear that each of these companies is competing hard for what could become a massive part of the overall Web. “Social networking right now is more hit-and-miss than science, and there are a lot of folks trying to find the next Facebook or MySpace. Google has the advantage of reach and large employee groups that can help drive the effort,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group.
“Google understands ‘simple,’ and Facebook is beginning to get annoying with regard to complexity and noise,” Enderle said. “In addition, the number of these services is driving many to start thinking about change. Done right, Google could become the provider folks gravitate to as the market consolidates.”
While Google Friend Connect, appears like a convincing way to allow social networking data and features to travel beyond the confines of a single website. Google was to officially launch the preview at a Campfire One developer event at Google’s headquarters Monday night. More information on the technology will be posted at http://www.google.com/friendconnect.