Google socialises

13 May 2008

Google has announced a preview release of its Friend Connect service, which will let websites benefit from the features of third-party social networks.

Google's service allows webmasters to add social features to their site using just "a snippet of code", providing visitors with a way to see and interact with friends they may have on social networks.

The search engine says that Friend Connect lowers barriers to the spread of social features across the web, and that it will stop people having to "create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web".

Google's announcement comes just days after MySpace unveiled its Data Availability initiative, and Facebook announced Facebook Connect. All three projects support open standards such as OpenID and OAuth.

Some commentators see the three projects as heralding the beginning of open data portability on the web. Writing on Mashable, Stan Schroeder said that Friend Connect, "the first big application of OpenSocial" marked "the end of the fragmentation era".

However, Marshall Kirkpatrick explained in a less-than-enthusiastic ReadWriteWeb post that Friend Connect's information could only be displayed inside an iFrame – "a webpage inside a webpage" that would prevent site owners creating mashups with the data.

Category: Google, Social media, Yahoo