Google Friend Connect: Social Networking For The Long Tail

May 13th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

Last night I was able to stop by the latest Google Campfire around Friend Connect. Despite everyone knowing the news, there was a great showing of bloggers and companies (Joyent, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Hi5) there to see a demo of Friend Connect.

Friend Connect is a collection of standards meant to make low traffic sites more social by harnessing existing social networking user bases. Google’s set of widgets let web developers quickly drop in code for widgets like sign-ups, comments, or really any other application on Open Social. Mussie Shore, a Google Product Manager, showed off what Google cooked up:

The system borrows bits and pieces I’ve seen already. The user login features were distinctly MyBlogLog, although now they supported all OpenID providers. The commenting widgets reminded me of JS-Kit, but now had identities attached to them. They both make a lot more sense together. All in all, if this was a stand alone startup, I’d be enthusiastic. However, it’s Google.

The series of data portability announcements from MySpace, Facebook, and Google are no accident. While Facebook, with its large, robust, base of user accounts has a head start in bringing its network to some of the largest sites on the internet. Google, on the other hand, took a strategy of going after the “long tail” of websites out there. Their “cut-n-paste” social networking solution is designed for even the most inexperienced webmasters, like that of Ingird Michaelson’s fan page.

Given this strategy, the uptake is likely to be slow. Facebook is mainly concerned with integrating into around 100 websites, whereas Google has to reach orders of magnitude more webmasters in order to have the same user base. Google will likely push the value added not only by Friend Connect, but also the value added by its growing library of applications. iLike has a compelling music widget, and Google Friend Connect is the only way you can get it.

Justin Smith has more notes on the speech.

Tags: facebook, Google, MySpace

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