p2pnet news | Advertising:- Google is an unscrupulous exploiter, but once in a while its teams come up with a truly innovative products, albeit they’re designed to weave even more people into its ever-expanding web.

Its vision of the WWW has it sitting squarely in the centre, gently manipulating the millions of strands and strings to its own ultimate advantage, p2pnet posted last year, and now Google has launched Google Friend Connect.

With it, “any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming - picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community,” it says.

Under the OpenSocial developer ‘community,’ Google is promoting a set of application program interfaces (APIs) to allow third-party programmers to build widgets that take advantage of personal data and profile connections on a social-networking site.

Data portability, in short. Yahoo and MySpace both back it, but Facebook is going its own way.

Says the New York Times, “Last week, site owners learned they could add information about their users from MySpace and Facebook,” and yesterday, “Google introduced its take on the same phenomenon, Google Friend Connect.

“Google puts two spins on this concept. First, its program is designed to allow very small Web sites to add some social networking features without sophisticated programming. All they have to do is copy a little code onto their Web pages.”

Second, it ‘lets’ site owners link to a range of other sites, including, for various functions, AOL, Yahoo and Facebook.

And ’spins’ is the word.

“Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more,” it says.

According to Google’s David Glazer, “Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social.”

Many sites, “aren’t explicitly social,” he says, “and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards - OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

Vic Gundotra said in 2007 that Google would soon begin an, “aggressive project to create software tools and give them away free in an open-source format,” stated the New York Times, going on >>>

The goal, he said, is to improve not just Google’s applications, but any software that runs on the Web. That, in turn, would drive more Internet use, and Google would benefit indirectly by selling advertising, he said.

Google has not been able to establish itself as a force in social networking, and it clearly wants to. “One of the things to say, very clearly, is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in a recent interview. “If you are of a certain age, you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real.”

Google said it has advertising relationships with several social networks, including a $900 million partnership to sell ads on MySpace, which the company said is performing well. Google is also making some money on Facebook, through ads that run inside applications that are used on that network.

A person familiar with Google’s efforts said that those applications have been far more effective for advertisers on social networks than users’ personal pages. “It is early, but those ads work very well, whereas the ads in overall social media platforms have shown less performance,” the person said. Mr. Kraus said that over time Google hoped to bring other social elements to Web applications, whether or not they run inside social networks. Analysts expect other Google services, including iGoogle, to be equipped with social features eventually.

Enter Friend Connect.

. .Stumble It!

Data portability - MySpace on-the-go user data, May 9, 2008
p2pnet - Google’s OpenSocial, March 11, November 1, 2007
New York Times - Google Wants to Help Web Sites Make New Friends, May 12, 2008
New York Times - Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook, October 31, 2007

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 5:26 am and is filed under Advertising. 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.

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