Google Friend Connect - the face of the future

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.

~ Date: May 10, 2008
article: Google to launch Friend Connect for the social Web)

In Dan’s article, entitled Google Brings Friend Connect To The Masses (dated May 12, 2008), he states:

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.”

In Dan’s article when asked if “Friend Connect is a response to Facebook Connect and MySpace.com’s Data Availability“, Glazer went on to say “People will speculate a lot in that direction. We didn’t create this code in the three days (since Facebook and MySpace made their announcements).”

According to Google’s Press Release, dated May 12th:

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), 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.

The press release informs us that Google’s Friend Connect will provide site owners a way of attracting and engaging more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites with less work involved. Google also said one thing, which caught my eye, they said:

In the weeks ahead we will be turning on more sites, adding more social applications, and integrating feedback from site owners and developers.

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”.

It seems to me that no one, except Google, has a clear concept of what Google Friend Connect will offer, yet everyone is making conjectures. Many of the “guesses” will probably be accurate enough, but which ones?

In Chris Lang’s blog, at Key Web Data, he wrote an article called Friends Connect Connects What? Google to Connect Friends. In this article he asked the question of “Will Google use Friends Connect to add another way they rank our blogs?”. Go have a read of all that he says, it’s very interesting.

In short, Chris is more interested in what I call “Stats”. He wants to see who read his blog and how often they read his blog. He’s not interested in seeing things like 20 pictures of his friends, I am not 100% sure if he is opposed to one image of each friend or if he is talking of one friend posting 20 pictures of themselves or their dog. He also doesn’t want outgoing links created for him, he wants to be in total control of the outgoing links himself. Once again, read the whole blog post, it’s pretty good.

This brings to mind a few thoughts of my own. First, it seems that after months of working on Friend Connect idea, Google itself isn’t fully prepared. I don’t really like the idea of “… in the following weeks they will be adding more social apps” (see the press release). I can fully understand the fact that no site is ever 100% complete, things such as turning on more sites and integrating feedback from it’s members are something to be expected. What I wonder about is the fact that they are not settled on the Apps yet. If they know new apps are going to be put in during the next few weeks, doesn’t that mean they know which apps are planned to be added? Now if they know this, why aren’t those apps put in before Friend Connect is released?

I actually would like to see one company, internet related or otherwise, to take the initiative to not rush putting out their product or service until they have all their ducks in a row. I tire of the “We can revise later” mentality because quite often such thinking makes it harder on me and others who decided to use their offering.

In addition I also get the impression that Google Friend Connect may be more of an answer to sites like Classmates.com and Reunion.com than FaceBook and MySpace. Maybe they are trying to compete with places like Propeller or Technorati. This is hard to tell because so little information is out there which gives us enough details to make a good guess. I hope they don’t try to put up another MySpace or FaceBook site, I think we have enough of those already.

So far most of the comments concerning what Google will offer is clouded in “guesswork”, “mystery” and “secrecy”. Good on Google for using this marketing ploy, and I am sure it’s a planned ploy rather than an Oops. They want people to get more interested and make their curiosity so bad that it actually draws hundreds of millions of users. I enjoy ploys as this at times, and this is one of those times. I give them an 8.7 on effort.

There are also questions over the SPAM issue. In my blog post, on the City Social Marketing Blog, I wrote about the definitions for SPAM which are out there and in other articles I showed a concern as to whether certain things these social media marketing sites do are read and deciphered by Google as SPAM. My question is “Did Google think this through so that they don’t inadvertantly affect our rankings by Google by listing them as SPAM?” or anything else which detracts from our rankings. Even though some may not see the importance of Search Engine rankings, search engines are still the way many internet users find sites and blogs.

What I want is versatility, I really don’t care what Google offers for their profile pages in Friend Connect - just as long as they have certain options and the ability for me to turn on and off the things they offer as I see fit. I want the ability to assign a name to the group as I see fit, in other words I don’t want them to limit me by saying I only have a choice of Friends or Business as my group name. This stuff shouldn’t be too hard for Google to do.

In about 6 hours we ought to know about Friend Connect and many of the questions will be answered. The bottom line is that we are simply going to have to wait to see what Google is trying to hand us - let’s hope for the best.