Google Friend Connect – part I: it’s about the data
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.
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