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| Google Friend Connect: Google's Attempt to Position Itself in the Middle of the Social Graph by Caroline Dangson, IDC (research provided by Rachel Happe, IDC) On Monday, May 12th, Google released a preview of a new service that will allow web sites that are not intrinsically social to add social networking features to their sites. The service called Google Friend Connect will give any web site owner a snippet of code to add to their site so that social networking features will run immediately without the hassles of programming. The code works by allowing a visitor to sign in to the Google Friend Connect web site using a log-in and password from an email or social network account to which he or she is already registered and has stored contacts (sites include Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more). Once signed in, the visitor gives the site permission to retrieve his/her profile and friends list from that account so that he or she can see, invite, and interact with friends on the Google Friend Connect web site. Google Friend Connect is Google's latest effort to jump on the data portability bandwagon. Facebook and MySpace announced somewhat similar initiatives last week, and Yahoo!'s Open Strategy (Yahoo! OS) will do the same within and around Yahoo!. IDC believes these moves by the major Internet players to be more open and 'play nice' with each other are really just competitive moves between MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo! and Google to own user data over the long run. Now that users can carry around their profile and contact lists to other web sites, they rely more heavily on the original site where they stored most of this data as their universal log-in account. Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo! and Google are fighting to reign as this central account for web users. User data is a pot of gold for Internet publishers. With Internet advertising becoming increasingly competitive and expensive, advertisers demand greater ROI for their campaigns. The psychographics of users of a specific web site plays an important role in the advertiser's decision to buy inventory on that site. In addition, user data is critical for behavioral targeting - a tactic that promises to improve the targeting and measurement of Internet advertising campaigns. IDC forecasts that the U.S. Internet advertising spend will more than double in five years, including advertising on true social networks. Clearly there is money to be made. One good attribute of Google Friend Connect is that it is less user-centric than the initiatives of MySpace and Facebook. Google Friend Connect empowers web sites to automatically gain social networking features without the dependency of the user to make it happen. The user just has to sign-in using a pre-existing account. Additionally, Google Friend Connect works across most of the existing standards such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with data access APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. Here, Google serves as the critical connector between third party web sites (blogs, wikis, etc.) and the user data and social connections they desire from visitors no matter what standard they use. One negative attribute of Google Friend Connect is that it will not (at least not initially) allow third party web sites to integrate users' social data with their own content. Therefore, no new compelling applications from the mash up of data will occur from this effort. With Google Friend Connect. data is sent through iframe instead of APIs. Google Friend Connect also does not work with Google's own Social Graph API. This means that third party web sites will not be able to see for themselves all the social connections of visitors who sign in through another account unless there is activity on the specific web site with these friends. The biggest irony (and criticism) of Google's announcement of a service to make the web more social is that Google does not even have its own successful social network. It has tried but failed with orkut. In terms of YouTube, Google has yet to prove it has the secret sauce to monetize the video sharing service. Google also falls behind MySpace, Facebook and Yahoo! when it comes to reach for its GMail and GTalk services. As we mentioned earlier, Google Friend Connect puts Google in the middle of the social graph by mediating the relationship between people's content (their blogs, etc.) and their friends - a smart but also a bit devious as a competitive move. We believe becoming a mediator is Google's only choice right now given that it does not have the social data other sites have like MySpace, Facebook and Yahoo!. MySpace's decision last week to form data sharing partnerships with Yahoo!, Ebay, Twitter and its own Photobucket subsidiary puts MySpace ahead of the game (Facebook has only named Digg as an initial launch partner so far). MySpace's move to share data with just a few, but important strategic partners creates greater opportunities for social media development. Interestingly enough, MySpace is also a member of Google's OpenSocial movement, yet the announcement came separate of that framework. Out of all the recently announced initiatives to make the Web more social, IDC believes Yahoo!'s Open Strategy is ultimately the most visionary. As we explained in a previous IDC Link, Yahoo! has the most complete product portfolio and the greatest audience reach to provide robust social networking functionality and quality user experience that is ubiquitous and fully integrated into its products and services. Google Friend Connect, on the other hand, will provide social networking capabilities to the Web at large without the stickiness, quality and depth promised by Yahoo! OS. Of course, we are still waiting to see Yahoo! OS come to fruition. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Computing News :: home page |