socialmedian: Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social

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Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social

Source: ReadWriteWeb

May 12, 2008

Summary

Later tonight Google will launch a new service called Friend Connect, aiming to "bring the social" to any page around the web. Unfortunately the service takes a bunch of open technical standards yearning to see the light of day through mass adoption and puts them in a dark little box where they will struggle to breathe.

Google could have worked with other large companies and with the creators of these standards (some are in the Data Portability Working Group that Google joined, for example) to tackle the hard questions around data exposure, integration and privacy. Instead they are pushing their Open Social standard around in an iframe. Easy is very good, but co-operation could have come up with something better than this.

The Plan

Friend Connect uses OpenID, oAuth and Open Social to let users log in to their favorite apps using a trusted ID provider and then access their friend info from those apps - all while on another website altogether. That could be any website that has chosen apps from the Open Social/ Friend Connect app gallery and pasted the ifram

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Comments (8)

Thomaspower,

May 13, 2008

why would they do this, control?

Jbond,

May 13, 2008

- This has been rushed out the door. Probably in response to all the other PR.
- It's a wrapper round any single OpenSocial gadget so it can be dropped into any old website with a snippet of javascript. So it's a single gadget, zero install, OpenSocial Container
- There will be a bunch of Google written gadgets available early
- Early gadgets remind me of MyBlogLog and JS-Kit
- In theory anyone can write gadgets. If they're clever enough
- It's damn clever!
- Out of all the majors, Google is the only one that hasn't bet the farm on their social network. So Google is the only one that can just give this stuff away. And Open always trumps Closed eventually.