Webware

Google's Friend Connect just got a really neat new feature: comment translation. It can now unify the language of any comment thread, turning any and all comments into one language. This means that if you have one post in Mandarin, another in Spanish, and yet another in Russian, you can click an option to read them all in the same language.

Google is using its own Translate API to do the dirty work, which means whatever unintentionally bad translations it would do on the Translate site will happen on comment threads. Friend Connect users who already have the tool installed on their blogs or sites do not have to upgrade; Google is pushing out the new features with the same bit of code.

Here's a quick video on how it works:

Google has launched a new option for site owners using its Friend Connect service. Besides the usual friends and discussion widgets, sites can now have a "social bar" which can sit atop, or at the bottom of their page. This facilitates user log-ins, as well as letting you get a quick view at the latest activity including members who have signed in and comments they've left.

Google is pushing the new bar as an alternative to putting some of the other Friend Connect page elements on your site. For instance, having this installed without the other widgets can keep the side navigation clear while still allowing users to log-in using their Friend Connect credentials. It also lets them see who's recently been on the page, and what those users have been interacting with.

You can see it action on this test site. Below is a demo video of how to drop it into your blog:

These data portability announcements keep rolling on: On Monday, Google announced that its Google Friend Connect product, which plugs social-networking features into participating sites, is now compatible with Twitter.

So what does this mean? Well, if you go to a site that uses Google Friend Connect, you can opt to use your Twitter credentials to log in to it. Then, as the official Google blog explained, you can then find which of your other Twitter friends are using the same site. Also, you can send out a "tweet" announcing that you've joined up.

Twitter was one of the launch partners for the MySpace Data Availability service, now known as MySpaceID. That has yet to launch, but MySpace has used Google Friend Connect to power the standard, so this could be a sign that it's still on the way.

What's not on Twitter yet? Facebook Connect, the rival log-in product developed by the social network, which rolled out to a full launch on the same day as Google Friend Connect. Rumor has it that Facebook tried to buy Twitter in a failed $500 million deal. There's still no reason to assume Twitter won't integrate Facebook Connect, but for now, it's just Google's alternative.

As part of the Le Web conference in Paris, News Corp.'s MySpace announced that it has taken a deeper plunge into the data portability pool.

The social network has announced its support for Google Friend Connect, which launched in full last week, and is using the standard to help power a new set of tools called the MySpace Open Platform. In conjunction, MySpace has ditched the distinctly unsexy moniker of "Data Availability" in favor of the new sobriquet "MySpaceID" for its universal log-in project. The Open Platform, in addition to MySpaceID, encompasses its OpenSocial-compatible app platform and the Post To MySpace sharing feature.

Right now, with MySpaceID, members can log in to partner sites with their MySpace usernames and find which of their MySpace friends use those partner sites. In the future, it'll also synchronize feed activity much like the rival Facebook Connect and allow MySpace members to register for third-party site accounts with their MySpace URLs.

Along with Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID was built with open standards OAuth, OpenSocial, and OpenID. MySpace, as well as Google, is one of the founding partners of the OpenSocial Foundation.

MySpace also announced the first two partners for MySpaceID: European mobile giant Vodafone and personalized home page service Netvibes. It still hasn't yet rolled out log-in credentials for the original Data Availability launch partners--Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo--but product manager Max Engel says those are still in the works.

Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect both launched last week, spurring a return to the social-networking turf wars and power struggle for control of the almighty "social graph."

It has only been a few days since Facebook and Google released their dueling press statements announcing that their identity platforms, Facebook Connect and Friend Connect, respectively, were open to the public.

I still think that Facebook will win this battle. But after I wrote my first posts, I was convinced to modify my early opinion with these qualifiers: it will win in the United States, and in the short term.

Facebook Connect sign-on is nicely done on this site.

In the States, Facebook's trump card is its social network. Google doesn't have a big U.S. social network, though in other countries (India and Brazil, notably), it has a strong presence with Orkut. And only a fool would discount Google in any market for good. In 1999, did anyone expect that the company would someday make a credible mobile-phone operating system?

So how are Facebook and Google doing so far in this battle? I asked both companies to send me a list of users for their identity services. Facebook quickly sent a list, which it claims is only partial, of sites from about 30 companies adopting Facebook Connect. Standouts include CitySearch, CNN.com Forum, TechCrunch, Xobni, MoveOn, and SFGate. To be fair, not all of the sites in the Facebook list have yet integrated the platform into their log-ins.

Getting competitive information from Google was more of a challenge. The list, I can say fairly, was not forthcoming. During a tortured telephone conversation, I was given a poor excuse about why I couldn't get the full list, and then later got a list of seven representative English-speaking sites, plus two in Portuguese, and one Chinese. The top sites on the list: The Inquistr and Go2Web20. The full list is after the jump.

Advantage, so far: Facebook

Google's Friend Connect widget.

As I've said previously, Google does not have technically inferior registration platform, by my estimation. But that's not its issue. For users, as least based on what I've seen so far, Facebook Connect can be more straightforward. Logging in via Google's Friend Connect is a little too different from what users may be accustomed to: You sign on in an Open Social widget and join the site as you would do with MyBlogLog. Once you join, other users can see that you're a member.

The advantage Google's widget-based approach has, though, is that it's pretty much the same on all the sites that use Friend Connect. And it gives users the option to sign in via not just a Google ID, but one from Yahoo, AOL, or an OpenID provider.

In the best implementations, logging into a site with Facebook pops up a blue-theme Facebook-branded log-in page. It can be more similar (though not identical) to logging in to any old site the old-fashioned way. And once you're in, your affiliation with the site isn't broadcast to the next hundred visitors to the site. Using Facebook Connect can be a smoother transition for users.

Google, likely in reaction to the official rollout of Facebook Connect, has opened up its universal log-in system, Google Friend Connect. Journalists on Thursday received a hurried e-mail saying, "Starting today, any website owner is welcome to add Friend Connect to his or her website -- no need to be whitelisted. We'll be posting on the Official Google Blog soon with additional details."

As with Facebook Connect, the advantage to users on Friend Connect sites is that they can register using a log-in that they're comfortable with and probably use every day--their Google or GMail ID and password.

Friend Connect appears somewhat easier and more straightforward to implement than Facebook Connect. Also, Friend Connect is linked to Open Social. "Any website that implements Friend Connect becomes an OpenSocial container, capable of running OpenSocial applications," the e-mail said.

Friend Connect can also update social services like Orkut and Plaxo, but nothing with the size of Facebook's network.

Google makes it easy.

I still give the nod to Facebook Connect in this stage of the battle for the ownership of online identity. I do like the Friend Connect features, but Google doesn't offer site managers the free marketing that comes with the Facebook program.

SAN FRANCISCO-- "Social is the new black," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said at a talk on the company's social-computing efforts at the Supernova conference here.

Kraus' view, which can be fairly said to represent Google's, is that these are the three big trends in the social Web:

Google's Joe Kraus talks about the future of the social Web.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

Discovery is becoming social
This was the most telling tidbit from Kraus' talk. He noted that searching on Google is good, but having your friends help you find what you're looking for is better. He gave an example of how social discovery can work--putting a status message in the IM field in Gmail and waiting for people to chime in to help you. But that is not representative of the state of the art in social discovery.

Takeaway: Look for Google to finally launch an initiative in social search. Or maybe acquire a company like Delver.

How we share is changing
Kraus says that people under-share because they don't want to appear self-important. Sending an e-mail to friends with new baby pictures, he says, requires "high social activation energy in the part of the sender," and thus slows down sharing. But guess what, he says: Your friends really do want to know what you're up to. They might not like being interrupted, but they do care.

You can see how sharing is changing on Facebook and FriendFeed, Kraus says. These sites let your friends discover what you're doing on their terms, and encourage more sharing, since you don't have to get in your friends' faces every time you update.

If you're reading tea leaves here, Kraus' mention of FriendFeed over Twitter was perhaps telling.

Social sites? No, social Web
Kraus notes that the idea of a site built around user content (like Epinions) is old-school. Today, users expect all sites to be social. They expect that if you're on a commerce site that you know your friends are also on, you can see what your friends bought there and if they liked it. Social is a feature, he says, not a destination.

This last trend, in particular, backs up what Google is doing now with Friend Connect, a new architecture that enables Web publishers to put modules on their sites that allow cross-site sharing.

Kraus also pointed to three recent standards as the key helpers to the creation of the social Web: OpenID for identity, OAuth for API authorization, and Open Social for building cross-site apps.

Previous coverage:
Google Friend Connect conference call live blog
Google brings Friend Connect to the masses
Yahoo, Google, MySpace form nonprofit OpenSocial Foundation

Here is Kraus' talk:

This post was updated at 3:17 PM with comment from Google's David Glazer.

A post Thursday on Facebook's developer blog explains that the social network has suspended participation in Google's "Friend Connect" project, citing a violation of its internal terms of service.

"Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we've had a chance to evaluate the technology," the post by Facebook employee Charlie Cheever read. "We've found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service."

In other words, while Facebook users would manually opt in to Friend Connect, they would not have control over the third-party sites that would then use Friend Connect through Google's API. "Our terms of service, for privacy reasons, have always forbidden redistribution of other Facebook information that an application takes," Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said in an interview with CNET News.com Thursday. For example, "where applications have tried to use Facebook data and pass it to third-party ad targeting networks to target their ads, we've shut down those applications."

According to Kelly, the social network never actually had a formal partnership with Google in Friend Connect, which allows owners of Web sites to add social features using the existing APIs from sites like Hi5, Plaxo, and Facebook. "There wasn't participation to start with. That was sort of a mis-impression that may have been formed by their release," he said. "We weren't briefed on how the Friend Connect product was going to work."

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, told CNET News.com that Google was "disappointed" with Facebook's decision. "(It's) a very simple issue. We think that users should be in control of their data," Glazer said. "We think that Friend Connect at all steps puts users in control of their own data, at every step of the way, and we're disappointed that Facebook disabled their users' ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends. It's that simple."

Facebook got into a privacy snafu of its own when it launched an advertising program, called "Beacon," that sent users' third-party activity on partnering retail and social-media sites to their Facebook profiles. The Facebook user base as a whole didn't seem to care much, but a few vocal privacy advocates said that there weren't adequate controls in place. Facebook eventually modified the application after a series of PR skirmishes that the company likely doesn't want to repeat.

Last week, Facebook announced that it would be extending its API to make data portable to external sites through Facebook Connect. According to Google's David Glazer, the concept sounds promising but Facebook hasn't said much about the technicalities yet. "I'd like to see it when they launch it," Glazer said. "We have not seen any information about Facebook Connect other than a press release. We like the intent stated in the press release, we think it's the same intent they've stated all along. We liked it earlier and we still like it."

As for the overall industry response to Google's Friend Connect, Glazer said, "I've been thrilled with the reception."

Representatives from Facebook told CNET News.com that the specific sections of the terms of service in question are the ones in which Facebook stipulates that developers using Facebook's API "may not store any Facebook Properties in any Data Repository which enables any third party (other than the Applicable Facebook User for such Facebook Properties) to access or share the Facebook Properties without our prior written consent" and "may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein."

Google engineering director David Glazer, right, talks to Matt Waddell at the Campfire One event at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Behind him is the skull of a T. Rex skeleton.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Maybe it was because Google preaching to the social-networking choir, or maybe it was the toasty campfires and hot cocoa, but demonstrations of Google's new Friend Connect service seemed generally well received Monday night.

Google executives showed off the technology, a Google-hosted application that designed to let Web site coders easily add social features to their sites, at the company's third Campfire One event at the company's headquarters here. Previous debuts at the events were of two other significant developer-oriented software technologies, OpenSocial and App Engine.

Program manager Mussie Shore gave the central demonstration sprucing up a guacamole-lovers' site with the ability to let users join as members, comment, post photos, rate recipes, and spread word of those activities to contacts on existing social-networking sites LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or hi5.

Ingrid Michaelson webmaster Jenny Begin and Nat Brown, CTO of iLike, show Friend Connect enhancements they made to the Ingrid Michaelson Web page.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Google Friend Connect employs several more-or-less standard networking technologies--OpenSocial as a foundation for richer Web applications; OpenID to handle login chores; OAuth to let users approve the grafting of new branches onto their existing social networks such as Facebook. It's yet another option in the complicated and fast-changing set of alliances and standards efforts in the social-networking domain.

Attendees I spoke to generally waxed positive about it. And Don MacAskill, Chief Executive of photo-sharing site SmugMug, said he'd be interested in trying it out.

In his demo, Shore picked some social applications from an online catalog, tweaked minor parameters such as background color, clicked a button to generate a few lines of JavaScript, copied it into his Web page, and exercised the new features on the revamped Web site.

Program manager Mussie Shore demonstrates Friend Connect. Key to the process is the 'generate code' button that produces some JavaScript that can be copied into a Web site.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Shore touts the benefits of Friend Connect.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

The crowd settles in at Google's third Campfire One event in the Googleplex courtyard.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

The Googleplex by night. Yes, the roof is crooked.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)