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.
Related:
- Google Friend Connect - part 2: The largest Social Network ever built
- 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...
- The Fred Wilson effect (a.k.a: social networking dividend of an open, public conversation)
- Last week made my head spin. As I continue with my biochemistry degree, I spectate the new media sphere as it twists and turns; I occasionally pass comment on it, either on this blog, on twitter, or in some other forum, for example, the comments sections of other sites. I happened to leave a couple of comments on Fred Wilson's blog, a high profile venture capitalist based in New York primarily investing in young US-based dotcoms. The comments, innocuous though I thought they were, must have caught his eye. He highlighted one, then the other, on his blog - both to give them some exposure because they echoed his own view or provided some new insight, and the second time round, to provide a case study in how social networking is evolving as we find new ways of having adult, mature conversations, in the open where anyone can learn from and join in. Twitter and blog comments are just two venues for open conversation, and open conversation and open social networking is headed somewhere BIG (the topic for a future blog post). The purpose of this post is to continue Fred's case study with hard data. Here are three graphs...
- About
- This is the personal dumping ground of Philippe Bradley, a French+English 21yr/old student at Oxford University (currently finishing up my 4-year MSc Molecular & Cellular Biochemistry). Looking for something to do, summer '08 onwards. To save you the Google, here's my consolidated web presence, or follow these direct links to some of the (all too many) places I'm @: To get in touch, I can be reached at philbradley@gmail.com , or on Twitter at @flipbrad PDJB: Talking nonce sense since 1986...
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