Google Makes a Hard Push With Friend Connect
Posted by Nick O'Neill on December 4th, 2008 1:51 AM
Tonight I’ve been seeing a lot of buzz about Friend Connect, Google’s open initiative to take of Facebook Connect. The service lets you login using your Google, Orkut, or Plaxo account. Both MySpace and Facebook decided to opt-out of integrating into the service but bloggers are embracing it at a rapid pace. Last night Google sent out a large number of invitations to bloggers to install their service.
The result is now a large number of blogs with Friend Connect directly integrated with their service. Surprisingly absent from all those sites? Facebook. Take a look at Twitter and you’ll see a surge in chatter about Friend Connect over the past few hours. I’ve had a few friends mention their new integration with Friend Connect. Facebook appears to still be rolling out the service on a one-at-a-time basis.
The chart pictured below also highlights how this week is shaping up to be the start of the race for controlling our web identities. While Facebook started the push with a big New York Times article, Google has apparently opted for the “grassroots” model and is dishing out Friend Connect code to countless bloggers. The result appears to be a gradual increase and our guess is an increase in usage as well.
Unfortunately we can’t monitor what the results are in terms of how many users have tested each service, but for companies, leveraging Facebook Connect makes a lot more sense due to the newsfeed. Now all that needs to be developed is a quick way for bloggers around the web to install Facebook’s service. I would guess that we’ll see the release of the previously leaked Facebook Connect Wordpress plugin.
For now, Google and Facebook have started battling head to head. This will surely be an exciting race to watch. Which service would you prefer to install on your site? Will you use one over the other, both, or neither?
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So interesting that a short time ago Microsoft (A closed source company) wanted to push forward a standard (Passport) that would have give users the ability to have one log in that worked for many sites. At the time many in the tech and development community saw this as just another Microsoft Land Grab for our Identity and our Content. Many people saw Passport as a Microsoft effort to finally gain control of the internet by becoming the standard for digital identity.
Today we have no less than 3 closed source companies in a race to become the "Standard" for holding or Identity and therefore having access to the content that we read and the content that we creates.
All of this at a time when there are many Open Source standards that could be used (Openid is just one that comes to mind) that if properly deployed would do the right thing by putting the user/member in charge of their log in as well as their relationships across many sites.
Have we forgotten the lesson of the not so distance past ?
Why do we not see a problem with the big 3 trying to become the proprietary standard in this very important area ?
Why do developers especially Open Source developers continue to build and extend applications for closed source companies that under mind open source standards and ideals ?
Why do users continue to view giving control of their identity and content to these companies as a win, when in fact the win is clearly on the side of the company that you have allowed to take control of your identity and to generate value and revenue from your content. In return for our compliance we do not even have a right to take our identity and our content where we want.
At adelph.us we believe in members freedom to control their accounts, and their content. We also believe that any revenue model should always put the members in the equation first. We believe in the Open Source community and ideals. We know we are not the smartest guys in the room and trust the our community of members and developers.
Break the chains of the old web 2.0 model. Do not give your content or your software development work to closed source old world companies they only seek to profit from you
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