As announced last weekend, Google is launching the mother of all data portability features. After Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Portability announcement, here comes Google beating the two social networks with its Google Friend Connect features.
Google Friend Connect is a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. 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.
Basically, with Google Friend Connect service, any visitors to any type of sites can see, invite and interact with each other within the boundaries of that site or through secured APIs with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Plaxo and others.
Google Friend Connect is set to be activated later tonight at this URL http://www.google.com/friendconnect/. Until then, we will have to wait and see how nifty this service would be.
Comments
6 responses so far ↓
Matt on May 12, 2008 at 10:23 am
Looks very interesting indeed. I can see a lot of value in a single web wide connecting system and would appeal to myself both as a site owner and a user. Being a google product it is sure to get enough momentum behind it quickly to become effective.
Ive always found the problem with social networking sites is the reluctance of all my contacts to join the same scheme.
I’ll be watching that link closely!
CT Moore on May 12, 2008 at 12:07 pm
This will completely and utterly crush every white label social networking platform sold to larger brand, not to mention preclude those brands from tapping into the Web 2.0 experience and controlling how people engage with that brand.
Nevertheless, I think this has the potential to really empower webmasters who are seriously passionate about growing the communities that surround their portals — just not with any direct way of monetizing that community. Basically, they’ll be able to attract and retain more visits, but they’ll have to rely on more conventional affiliate marketing formats to convert those numbers into dollars.
I’m sure, however, that Adwords will be tailored to show much, much more relevant ads to users using Friend Connect, so Google won’t only gain a huge chunk of Web 2.0 enthusiasts, but also the affiliate marketers that chase after them.
charlee tremblant on May 12, 2008 at 4:13 pm
well considering what happened when google tried to launch its own video service and was crushed mercilessly by youtube, so they had to shell a few hundred million to buy that.
not to mention that as much as myspace is dull it is owned by rupert murdoch. so it does have the dark prince of media backing it. they aren’t go anywhere soon.
Martyn P on May 13, 2008 at 11:46 am
Very interesting! I can see this doing quite well…
Mike Bradbury on May 15, 2008 at 8:44 am
Wow. So let me get this straight… or skraight as they apparently say in ghetto-fabulous Orlando.
All I need is C-Panel with fantastico, a working knowledge of something like Joomla, and a Google account and I can be the next Myspace?
Holy e-book!
Allan on May 15, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I wonder how this affects SEO.
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