Google Friend Connect was showcased at a Campfire One gathering of 3rd-party software developers at the company’s “Googleplex” campus in Mountain View, California a couple of days ago. The plan comes just days after top social networking websites MySpace and Facebook broke down barriers of their online communities to let members share profile information at other websites.
Friend Connect lets website owner’s add social-networking features such as registration, member galleries, message boards, and fun or useful third-party applications called “widgets” by simply adding snippets of free computer code.
People visiting websites using Friend Connect will be able to interact with contacts they know from online communities such as Facebook, Google Talk, orkut, Plaxo or hi5.
To demonstrate, an iLike application was incorporated into an official website of musician Ingrid Michaelson so that visitors don’t have to leave to connect with friends at their social networking profiles. All website operators using Friend Connect see are user nicknames and images, if any, posted along with them.
Concerns about protecting people’s profile data prompted Google to decide to work individually with website operators interested in Friend Connect, according to Glazer. Website owners are invited to put their names in a “white list” queue online at www/google.com/friendconnect.
Google wants to be at the heart of the Internet trend of people building online identities that play, share, and conduct business in virtual environments, according to one Silicon Valley analyst. Google plans to phase in more websites and social networks in the months to come, with the Open Social software platform as a basis for interoperability. This is good news for the forward development of social networks but it also will make webmasters more dependent on Google as it searches for more revenue opportunities.