Google Social Network - the other shoe poised to drop.....

Ironically enough, I heard this one first on Twitter (Twitter is very good for Technology news and comment)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (May 12, 2008) – Tonight at Campfire One at the Googleplex (http://code.google.com/campfire/), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) will announce a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening's Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

Not that this is replacing one walled garden for another, you understand....nor even that its unexpected. Anyway;

Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.

It was ever thus - last year's new tech is this years new big thing is next years infrastructure. Its a pity that Google has done it, rather than it being executed in a truly neutral Open Source mode, but it is better than what there is now by a long way, though I do think the collective "we" need to scrutinise the data mined by Google is reasonable for the use of the system, and not excessive. Longer term I'd really prefer this sort of system to be truly open like the 'Web.

I opined last year that Marc "Netscape" Andreesen could have done the open version, but he's no fool and built a niche closed system, Ning. I argued that Yahoo should have done this too, but no. I guess Facebook is the Netscape of this Fin de Cycle

(Hat tip to Jof Arnold)