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.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.