David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect as plumbing for the rest of the web. Website owners will be able to use the hosted application to allow interactions with visitors from social-networking sites such as Facebook and Orkut, by copying and pasting snippets of code into their site.

“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.”

Well they can interact – but there seem to be a few problems with this kind of interaction. Problems with respect to site owner control (more on that later).

Google Friend Connect employs several more or less standard networking technologies: OpenSocial as a foundation for richer web applications; OpenID to handle login chores; and OAuth to let users approve the grafting of new branches onto their existing social networks. The move I think is geared at creating a wider platform for Open Social Applications. That part of Google’s strategy is flawless. In the beginning they wanted Open Social Applications to be across social media – now they have decided to change the definition of social media – or have they? Maybe not. Not yet atleast.

For now have a look at this video which clearly explains how Friend Connect works for site owners and site visitors and the extent of the ‘social experience’ (try and figure out where the black hole lies)

How is Google’s Move Different From that of MySpace and Facebook?

While Facebook and MySpace are looking to make Social Networks the gateways to the Internet, Google Friend Connect to dig into social networks and use information from them to drive activity outside as a result of which updates get published within the network with the hope that more people will be tempted to look beyond the updates and go outside the network. The moves of MySpace, Facebook and Google however are similar in the sense that one singular social profile will be available across the Internet. It’s interesting to note that Facebook has signed up on Google Friend Connect as well. This virtually means that slowly, but surely, Facebook is looking to be that aggregator of a person’s Internet activity. That gives them access to more information than they could possibly imagine – this can then be used to micro target advertising.

What is Facebook Thinking?

What I don’t understand is how Facebook Connect is Different for Google Friend Connect from a strategy perspective. From a feature perspective, with Google Friend Connect, your Facebook Profile is not transported – the service only allows feeds to be sent back to Facebook (im not sure that this is very good for Facebook but only time will tell; Facebook tried to do this with Beacon). So its more ‘get’ and less ‘give’ while in Facebook Connect, your profile is transported to partner sites (with you being able to control restrictions).

I think Facebook is banking on the fact that people will sign on to websites which have Google Friend Connect embedded only BECAUSE they feel that it complements their personality as a result of which they’d like their friends to know and they won’t go and sign up on every website loaded with friend connect because then this might not showcase a singular ‘rich’ personality so they probably think activity ‘outside’ will not overtake activity ‘inside’ and also give a more inclusive experience till they can figure how to make the ‘outside’ the ‘inside’.

What’s Wrong  with IFrame?

Im a little sceptical about Google’s friend connect mostly because all the data will be showcased using an IFrame – which is basically an embedded document. These embedded documents can be made interactive using JavaScript and the like. They still however remain beyond the reach of the site owner who cannot control what goes on to the applications. For example, if it is a photo application where people can upload photos, I doubt site owners can control the kind of photos that go up on to the website. So what happens if someone put spam? Do you remove the IFrame and reinsert the application? Recently, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer introduced contentEditable and designMode, which enables users to edit the contents of the HTML contained in an IFrame – I don’t know if that can be used for the applications embedded on sites using Friend Connect – I doubt. Also – all the data on Friend Connect across all individual websites is owned by Google stored on Google servers. That seems a little scary to me.

To get a comprehensive difference between the MySpace Data Portability, Facebook Connect, and Google Friend Connect – have a look at the box below (source GigaOM). 

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