Google FriendConnect Trails Twitter
Keen readers of any of the SMM blogs will notice at the foot of the right sidebar a new feature. Each now has a Discussion ‘Wall’ provided by Google Friend Connect. This is Google’s attempt to get on to the Social Media plane. It has some serious catching up to do, given what Twitter and Facebook have achieved here.
Usually if a topic has developed a following, you will find some chit-chat on Twitter about it via a hashtag (#). The easiest way to check is via TweetChat. If you register there and check the FriendConnect room, you will find it is usually pretty quiet. If Google Friend Connect is to develop any traction, that is not a good sign.
Google is diligently working away on the Social Web and last week announced that you can Take your Google Contacts with you.
Too many of these sites access your list of friends by asking for your username and password so they can sign in as you and scrape your contact lists. The problem is that once a website has your password, it can access all sorts of data, not just your contacts. Portable Contacts to the rescue! Portable Contacts (affectionately known as "PoCo") is an open standard that aims to make it easier to access "who-you-know" information in a secure way — this means sites don’t have to employ the "password anti-pattern" of scraping websites.
That just did not seem to get anyone’s attention. Google announced originally that Google Friend Connect is now available early in December. Shortly after they announced that Google Friend Connect was integrating with Twitter.
This means that when you join a Google Friend Connect-ed site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website.
No one seemed to get the message. More recently, Google has announced an Improved help forum for Google Friend Connect. It just did not seem to get the headlines.
Jordan McCollum of Marketing Pilgrim suggested that although Google Reader Now Hosts Conversations, Google is not building a social network.
Really. They’re not. They’re just adding features to every product ever made to enable you to communicate and otherwise share information among your peer group and store all your information in a centralized place. That’s soooo not a social network, so I don’t need anybody telling me about how Google Reader’s new comment feature shows that they’re a social network.
To an extent, that is confirmed in her mind by the way in which Google Friend Data Goes Portable. Clearly this does not in any way create a social network. All this does it to let you take all that shared information – including your list of contacts – and pass it among your peer group all over the web.
If Jordan McCollum is right, then these FriendConnect Discussion panels on the SMM blogs will never get used since they do not create social networks. It will be interesting to see what happens with them.
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March 31st, 2009 at 11:24 am
Although Google is not officially building a social network they are very concerned with the social atmosphere of the web and how the users interact with each other through conversation.
Look at the blog scene in which they bought Blogspot and they are always looking to improve their services. Social media is something that they just cannot ignore.
March 31st, 2009 at 1:47 pm
At first glance, I thought Google was bringing this technology in a little late in the game. Once I started to learn more about Google FriendConnect, it seems like a super easy way for people who don’t know a lot about web development to make their personal websites more interactive.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:58 pm
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April 6th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Here in Vietnam this new service of Google is not widely used at the moment (Only “SEO” and “web 2.0″ guys use it).
So Google is trying to be the 2nd, after Twitter?
April 12th, 2009 at 2:51 am
There are some rumors that Google is in talks to aquire Twitter
April 16th, 2009 at 6:56 am
Rumors…that’s about it…they will pretend to be thinking about putting a offer in, get access to the technology that they want, take it and then say- eh! I dont want it anymore…
April 16th, 2009 at 11:09 am
I don’t see Google FriendConnect making a huge impact on the social networking scene. They have trailed too far behind to be a big player. However, if Google can figure out a way to link all these social networking sites together, then I think they would have a great idea. These social networking sites are great individually, but its very hard to manage a facebook account a myspcae account a twitter account a delicious account and other individually. If there was a way to bring all that content to one space, then they could become a big player.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:13 am
I have heard some rumors about acquiring Twitter by google too. It’s really good news, they should do that as fast as possible.
April 27th, 2009 at 7:18 am
Its true i have also heard that google may try to get hold of twitter.