Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social [1] participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.
MySpace launched Data Availability [2] on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect [3], another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).
Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me [4] for more of my thoughts on this.
Exciting times ahead for social networking - Read full article [5]
Links:
[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/30/details-revealed-google-opensocial-to-be-common-apis-for-building-social-apps/
[2] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/08/myspace-embraces-data-portability-partners-with-yahoo-ebay-and-twitter/
[3] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/09/facebook-responds-to-myspace-with-facebook-connect/
[4] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/30/friendfeed-the-centralized-me-and-data-portability/
[5] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/09/threes-company-google-to-launch-friend-connect-on-monday/
[6] http://duvien.com/node/128
[7] http://duvien.com/html-emails-taming-beast