Google goes social network mad with Friend Connect

With all the fanfare of a royal wedding (well maybe not that much), Google has launched a new tool which appears to be an API allowing users for “Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites”, following closely on the heels of similar products from Microsoft (Data Availability) and Facebook Connect.

The tool will allow users to:

• Securely send personal data such as friends lists, presence status and the like
• Maintain single friends list

So why you may ask are organisations fighting for what seems such a small prize. The answer is the price is actually a very large one, one worth potentially millions of pounds to the winner. At present it would seem Google’s product does seem limited in some rather major areas such as user profiles (well to the same extent as Facebook and Microsoft (via Hotmail etc), however it would seem if this can be sorted via partnerships with other high profile partners this problem should be somewhat alleviated.

There is already a reasonably amount of noise on the net about this, and it is worth keeping an eye on places such as

Search Engine Roundtable - Google goes social with Friend Connect 

Google Friend Connect - Webmasterworld 

Google Friend Connect - Search Engine Watch 

Add comment May 13th, 2008