First of all it’s open source and that will help create necessary motivation to add innovation around this API.

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Two weeks, three announcements and wild west world of social networking is all topsy turvy.  Following Myspace and Facebook announcement, Google today gave a preview announcement of FriendConnect. Goals of FriendConnect are:

• Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
• Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
• Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

I will see what more comes out of scheduled press conference. This is getting very interesting and options for developers are growing. In a true sense, walls are coming down and data is flowing across gardens :)  Now I need to go and dig into APIs and make MessageDance dance across these newly discovered openness.

Update: TechCrunch has more details on the story:

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.

Friend Connect is geared at the Long Tail of small sites that don’t even have any user information. It allows them to tap into bigger sites and piggyback on their user sign-in and registration, list of friends, and interactions between those friends. It takes advantage of many existing standards, including Facebook’s (it is not an official partner, but it Google is taking advantage of its published APIs). Of the many standards emerging, Glazer thinks that OAuth is the way to do it right.

Glazer admits that Friend Connect is but one small step towards the larger goal of being able to connect to any friend on any application, on any site. But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.

The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

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.

So its a still in work in progress. I think iFrame level integration is a bummer. Oauth seems to be gaining traction so that’s good. Atleast developers will see their efforts protected around Oauth. Oauth is primarily used by service providers to allow user to give Server A permissions to use data residing on Server B. Like the way MessageDance user grant permission to MessageDance to go fetch Blogger credentials from Blogger service. (OpenID is different from OAuth in the sense that it’s more of a user browser context to server side communication. Users use openID to identify themselves and login to various web services. It’s not between services to services, which is what OAuth does).

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