Google to launch Friend Connect for the social Web

Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming Yahoo Open Strategy.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington reasons:

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don't have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

With 70 million users, more than 20,000 Facebook applications, and about 350,000 developers, Facebook has a major scale advantage over Google's Orkut. MySpace has the advantage of an even larger user base, but lags Facebook on the developer and application fronts.

However, Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.

I spoke with David Glazer, Google director of engineering, in March about injecting the social graph and data portability into the core fabric of the Web. He said the big challenge isn't the technology but applying existing and emerging standards, such as OAuth(secure API authentication), OpenID (identity management) and OpenSocial APIs (application integration).

The key for all the data portability efforts (check out the DataPortability Project) is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet. Stay tuned for more details on Google's Friend Connect and the next chapter of "The Making of the Social Web."

See also:

Facebook to open the gates with 'Facebook Connect'

MySpace announces 'Data Availability' project with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, Twitter

Yahoo rewiring itself from the inside out

Pizza time for OpenSocial applications

[Tony McCune]

This trend is the beginning of a whole new generation of community generated standards. In addition to social networking applications, products like ours (http://www.digitalchalk.com) will benefit greatly by providing users with seamless access to their online identity. The community controlled trust concept is what Microsoft tired to do with their failed passport initiative. The only two things they were missing was "community" and "trust".

[livecrunch]

I agree with getting data across etc, but yet I wouldn't like to have 2 sites combined into one.

I like what facebook is and what they stand behind. I also like MySpace and what they stand for.

I just would like facebook to be facebook from 1y ago and MySpace without Profile "who**s" who just add friends.

[factoryjoe]

Note that it's "OAuth", not "Oath", which is something entirely different!

[WeCanDoBIZ]

Google's joining of the data portability bandwagon is an interesting one, although I would suggest the value is in other sites, like ours, being able to get their hands on GMail and Adwords users rather than the handful of Orkut users out there.

I would indeed like to think that something like an extended mplementation of OpenID could be used here by all, rather than each site have its own proprietary implementation to pass profile and friend information to other useful sites.

I have long said the next wave of social networking is specialist. more-focused sites and these moves by Google, Facebook and MySpace will help realise that.

Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

[Danny Ayers]

re. "injecting the social graph and data portability into the core fabric of the Web" - while the auth pieces are important for access control, the graph and portability are already part of the Web's fabric - the Giant Global Graph and Linked Data.

http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data