Google Friend Connect Is Almost Upon Us

Posted by warner

May 12, 2008

Here it comes. soon, very soon. A big new initiative by Google to make various social profiles interconnected and to make it so anyone “can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming”

Just read about this in depth at City Social Marketing Blog

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect, whose site is inaccessible Monday morning, as plumbing for the rest of the Web.

“The Web is getting better by getting more social. We’ve baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site,” Glazer said. “Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app.”

According to Dan Farber, of CNET News:

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

Google also said:

Visitors to websites which use Friend Connect will have the ability 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”.

Exactly what it will be is going to happen only hours from now at http://www.google.com/friendconnect , as of this writing that link is 404