As expected (below), Google is announcing Friend Connect today. In a press release, Google says:
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.
There will be some demo sites, including http://www.ingridmichaelson.com/
TechCrunch talked to Google engineering director David Glazer:
The point of Friend Connect, he says, is to ", give users a shortcut to connections they've built up somewhere else." So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs (you choose which one you want to sign in under, with more options coming). Then you authorize the site to go out and retrieve your friend's list from that network. Any of those friends who also happen to be members of the site you are on will then show up and you can interact with them.
TechCrunch comments:
Basically, what Friend Connect does is gather this data from big social networks in whatever way they make available and then presents it in a uniform way to third party sites. It also works as a pass-through between those third party sites and the big repositories of social data. This eliminates any programming hassles on the part of small Websites that want to tap into these social networks, but it also positions Google as the central switch connecting all of these different identity systems.
And tomorrow, the world!
