Over The Counter Culture

Having originally assumed that the reason Facebook, Hi5 and LinkedIn (FHL), amongst others, were involved in the Google Friend Connect (GFC) service, I initially wanted to write this post to argue that this was the biggest strategic mistake of their lives. Turns out, Google is involving them whether they like it or not - using their APIs to let you pull in your friend data to your Google Friend Connect profile from your other social networks.

In light of this, the point I’ll argue is therefore that not slamming the door on GFC’s scraping of their data would be a fatal mistake for FHL. Needless to say, deprived of their data, GFC loses all its value to users - so this is a zero-sum game.

I argued yesterday that all FHL could possibly gain from this is more information about you as you browse around the web and use social features on various websites. That’s an interesting datapoint (which they may not even have access to because they’re unwilling participants in this scheme), but long term, being part of GFC means their sites will be abandoned as Google rolls out the biggest social network mankind has ever seen, building on the sum of FHL’s networks, and more besides.

To see where I’m coming from, you have to understand the next strategic plays that I see Google potentially making with its GFC service. Indulge me in the following thought exercise:

1. GFC starts improving your GFC profile, which others can see if they’re connected to you on  Facebook, Hi5 or LinkedIn (FHL) - shut out if not (i.e. privacy maintained)
2. GFC enables you to search for the GFC profiles of people you are connected to on FHL
3. GFC lets you add other sources of your social network - such as your contacts in Gmail, Google Talk, etc. Email is a vast social network that as yet doesn’t have any social infrastructure around it (aside from tools like Xobni) - but imagine email networks being integrated into GFC
4. GFC lets you add Google OpenSocial apps to your GFC page - oh I dunno, say for example… a SuperPoke widget, a FunWall app, a Minifeed widget, a photo album gallery… does your GFC profile page now start to remind you of somewhere else?
5. The result? A GFC service where the profile pages are just as interactive and feature-filled as Facebook (i.e. of equal feature-derived value), where you can follow the activity of, and interact with (once they sign up to GFC) all your friends from Facebook, Hi5, LinkedIn, all the sites you use GFC features on, and all your Gmail contacts - you can ‘friend’ people just by adding them on Gmail and having them reciprocate the connection (hence Gmail becomes the social connector system instead of friending people on FHL)

Boom, there goes the neighbourhood, Facebook! Sorry, FriendFeed! Bye, LinkedIn, nice knowing you! Hi5, let’s face it, it’s about damn time you were abandoned. Google just built a meta-socnet. Don’t let your employees fight to be the one that gets to turn off the lights at your spanking new offices and costly datacentres.

This week, Google announced a new tool to help me and all other website owners create social  features in our sites. It’s a library of javascript gadgets that I link to (in the Google library) from my site, and loads up in the site (imagine it instead of the Disqus comments system I currently have installed) to add features for visitors which they can use by signing in - like comments, a chatroom, a photo gallery for people to upload photos to, product reviews, whatever.

Blogopunditry and civil rights hippies are pleased that you can log in with a google account, or OpenID, AIM, Yahoo, maybe others in future - so this isn’t a straight-up move to get people to sign up Google Accounts. No, it’s far more clever than that.

According to their demo video, once you have a Google Friend Connect (GFC) account (having logged in with yahoo, google, openID, whatever), you can tell it who all your friends are - you simply link to your Facebook, Hi5, Orkut and/or LinkedIn social networks and it sucks that information out.

For you, that’s cool, because when you use the chatroom on my site, it will tell you which of your friends also use the site, and lets you invite others. Good for me, too - and so little hassle setting it up! Win for users, win for webmasters.

But why should Facebook, Hi5 and LinkedIn (FHL) participate? Well, you might argue that it drives traffic to them and helps them grow/helps lock in users. I disagree. Does importing your FHL networks to GFC really add that much value to my FHL accounts? Not really. does it make me visit FHL more? Doubt it. So it’s not driving much traffic to them. This isn’t about growth for them.

Now FHL have to fight a really difficult marketing battle, to somehow get a brand image as “the site everyone else using friend connect wants you to be part of because they don’t use the other ones so they don’t add the site you’re currently on, to friend connect and so you will miss out on cool invitations to join communities on the web”. Urgh, that battle will not be pleasant.

If this isn’t about growth for them, it must be about the data. Facebook showed its hand with Beacon, and this is right up that same alley. FHL want to know where you go and what you do on the Internet. Are you part of the OverTheCounterCulture community, i.e. an alpha human being? Maybe you write reviews for gadgets on Amazon in their GFC widget which they (would never) replace their own comments system with? Well next time you visit Facebook your minifeed will have an advert for barack Obama, or the new iPhone. Or maybe you’re the sort of person that posts photos of pwetty horsies on pwettyhorsies.com - time for facebook to use up its bottom-of-the-barrel inventory on you, not me, darling - expect some ‘punch the monkey to win a prize’ banners in your minifeed.

EDIT: the GFC press release, and their demo video, have facebook, linkedin and Hi5 in it.I was initially planning on explaining why this would be the most shortsighted, stupid strategic move facebook has ever made - and it was going to be a fairly incisive post - but it transpires those companies aren’t actually part of GFC, at least at present. What the hell is going on?

EDIT 2: OK, most incredibly, it seems Google is doing this without FHL’s permission. Astounding! I will write the Part 2. Nobody realises this could be Google building the biggest meta-socnet the world has ever seen, and if FHL don’t shut the door on GFC, this could spell the end of all 3.

Wall animation from Italian artist Blu

Godwin’s Law states: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

It’s often mixed in with Reductio ad Hitlerum: Invoking Hitler automatically makes you lose the argument.

On that basis, given the video below, should Obama bow out of the US Democratic candidacy race?

(the video, by the way, is an absolutely brilliant instance of a novel Internet meme, putting new subtitles over scenes from Downfall, a good film recounting Hitler’s last days before his suicide oin a Berlin bunker - but it’s doubtless very offensive to HillDog)

I wonder if companies should consider setting up an internal (password protected) tool called Prologue

Basically it’s a private blog (hosted on a platform, in this case Wordpress.com) where you and your fellow employees can broadcast micro-updates to the rest of the org (very efficiently - you could plug the RSS feed of your coworker updates straight into your RSS reader or Outlook/Entourage, etc). I love the innovation these guys have shown - this is just a special Wordpress skin that does something clever with the Twitter microblog idea, delivering a lot of use to organisations and groups. Simple and clever. I like.