Facebook Connect

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"Social network Facebook announced Friday the debut of Facebook Connect, a new technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites. It makes the company the latest major Web site to embrace the concept of data portability."

Facebook to open the gates with 'Facebook Connect' | The Social - CNET News.com



"Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming.The Web is getting better by getting more social. We've baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site," Glazer said. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app."

Google brings Friend Connect to the masses | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com
 


You could apply the tail wagging analogy to google as well. As much as they claim Facebook is a walled garden (McCrea), Google itself is as well (although Facebook prefers the term "platform") so they are being kind of hypocritical. Everyone uses google to do their searches and therefore we have to play by their rules...rarely does a discussion about SEO involve anything other then the Google search engine. Either way, Google is getting nowhere with Orkut whereas Facebook is now the dominant leader in social networking online. So for Facebook this is a viable business strategy whereas it is more of a long term defensive strategy for Google. As well, it is a natural evolution for Facebook which is why they announced it before Google.

McCrea: "John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, said Google's Friend Connect is "flipping the model" from walled gardens (such as Facebook) to a more open social Web"
 
My take is that Google is actually trying to stick their nose where it doesn't really belong. They don't own any social network users (aside from Orkut), so they're trying to be the middleman between the social networks and other sites that want to use data from the social networks. It makes some sense that "middleware" will make life easier for the independent sites that want to integrate, but as we saw with Facebook shutting down Google's integration with Friend Connect, the big social networks may not want Google controlling that relationship - they sitll want to control their users' data directly, even if it's going off of their site. Very interesting indeed.
 
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