Friend Connect: knocking down the walls

Friend Connect allows any site owner to turn his site into a mini-social network, by cleverly using the already-established friend connections on bigger networks such as Orkut or hi5. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app." So says David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.

How it works

This is how it works:

• A site owner decides to add social networking features to his small website.
  
• He chooses what kind of features this social network should have (member registrations, members' gallery, reviews or many others) and puts these widgets, provided by Google, on his website.
  
• Anyone who visits the site and joins the new mini-network, can meet and interact with the other new members. Most important, any visitor can immediately interact with his existing friends from other social networks (such as Google's Orkut, Plaxo, hi5 and more).
  
• In other words, the visitor will be able to interact with friends from other networks, without leaving the small site.

People who discover new websites that use Friend Connect can now bring their friends to the site, instead of taking the site to their friends. They can publish details of their activity on the small site on their main social network profile. Also, they can immediately see which of their friends are already members of the new website and interact with them from with that application.

Although in limited release, Friend Connect is already being used by some websites. A good example is www.ingridmichaelson.com which uses the features of Friend Connect to publicise Ingrid's music. As Google explains:

"Fans who visit Ingrid's site can connect with their friends without having to leave the site. Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles, see who is attending concerts, and enjoy other features of the iLike application, all at Ingrid's website. With Google Friend Connect, people will be able to enjoy their favorite features with their friends on any website across the web."

No separate login

An important feature of Friend Connect is that users will not have a separate login for each website. Google rather uses OpenID, oAuth and OpenSocial, which are the emerging technologies that are paving the way to a "wall-free" Internet.

Google does not have a global social network hub (although Orkut is very popular in some regions, like Brazil). But, very cleverly, it will now be able to use the "99% of the web that is not socially networked" and create a means to allow people to connect anywhere. This, I think, is very similar to their content strategy: although Google itself does not own any content creating mechanism, it is still able to use the others' content to sells ads through adsense. A very clever, and very effective, model.

The success of Friend Connect will rely on its ability to integrate the big social networks into the model. Already Facebook has announced that it is pulling out because of privacy concerns, although it might consider rejoining if these concerns are addressed.

Friend Connect is the third big recent announcement of intent to create a more open web (MySpace and Facebook also announced their plans). Whatever the outcome and success of these ventures will be, it is increasingly clear that we are moving toward a boundry-less web, which will rely on content portability as the foundation.

The good news is that worthy content will be increasingly easily propagated. The bad news is that more work, more planning and more strategy will be required by corporate entities to ensure that they stay ahead of the online pack. Whether or not you or your clients' corporate sites are part of the new media space, be sure that allowing your visitors to engage and interact will soon be a requirement and not just a feature.