David Glazer was speaking on the Google conference call today about the new Google Friend Connect. When asked about when the new service would be ready for prime-time, David responded “months; a couple”. Also of note was that this is not related in any way to Facebook Connect. As of now all we have seen is press releases and screenshots from Google, Facebook and Myspace.

So what is the rationale around announcing this all at the same time? I think this was strategic by all players. Myspace knew that Facebook was preparing to make an announcement about Facebook Connect. As such they went ahead an preempted Facebook’s announcement that would come on the anniversary of the Facebook platform announcement a little less than one year ago.

Google rapidly followed suit and now all players are suddenly involved in the opening of the web. From a few sources I’ve spoken with, this has been in the works for some time now but the timing of the announcements of each of these external facing platforms was not set yet. These announcements mark an inevitable transition from the closed web to the open web.

Unfortunately, everything is still theory with a little bit of substance. Honestly, my guess is that Facebook is furthest along in making this platform a reality. According to Facebook’s PR department, the platform will be publicly available within the “next several weeks.” The platform race has kicked back into full speed. Game on!

Google has made its official announcement about Friend Connect, the service launching at tonight’s Google Campfire event. According to the press release, Google Friend Connect enables “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.”

Members of Friend Connect include Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more. Yes, you heard that right, Facebook is one of the launch partners with Friend Connect. This may be the reason both Facebook and Google decided to use the same name: they’re using the same platform. One big announcement with this is that iLike will extend to band websites as well. Hadi Partovi, President of iLike is quoted in the press release, “Friend Connect is a significant opportunity for iLike, artists, and fans. The iLike Artist Dashboard^TM will be the first content-management system that allows artists not only to post their songs, concerts, and videos to every leading social network from one dashboard, but also to simultaneously manage the content on their own websites.”

This is huge news and it also sounds like the widgetization of applications. Social applications that have existed within the framework of social networking sites for the past year will now extend to other websites. While the logistics of how this will work have not been revealed, expect many more details to be presented at Google’s event later tonight.

The activities of users on external sites will be published within social networks inherently making the external sites more viral. This is a huge deal and makes the rest of 2008 an interesting year for social application developers. The best part of this is that users that would like to embed social applications on their website will need no prior coding experience. This is a huge announcement and a continuation of the big announcements we saw last week. Read more about it via the Google press release.

Update
Google has stated that they aren’t officially a partner with Facebook on this launch. Not sure why they mentioned it in their press release.

Yesterday Myspace made a massive announcement: they would embrace data portability and launch the “Data Availability” initiative. The goal of the initiative is to provide users with a single control panel where they can control what sites have access to specific data within their profile. This is something that data portability evangelists have been asking for, for the past couple years. I’ve decided to break out the pros and cons and various aspects of what it means to different groups.

Pros
This is a strategic product which pushes forward the movement to true data portability. It provides users with a singular control panel to access their social profiles across the entire web. It puts competing sites in a position in which they now must continue to open up their data. It continues the momentum which we saw with the announcement of the Data Portability workgroup, potentially making 2008 the year of Data Portability.

Cons
Myspace owns my data, not me. I should be able to control all of my data from an application absent of third party intervention. It requires other sites to support new standards and doesn’t fit within the existing construct. This is still nothing more than a screenshot and a formal announcement; Myspace announced their platform would be ready months before it actually was. Finally, this is not a single login solution like OpenID and there is currently no support for OpenID.

For Users
So what does this mean for users? Well users now get a single control panel for their social existence on the web. This makes it easier to control who has access to my data and what data they have access to. I now can have an easy way to remember all of the sites that I have released my profile data to.

For Facebook
What does this mean for Facebook? I can sum it up in one word: ouch! Not only has Myspace launched a competing platform but they have just announced their willingness to out open Facebook. It also could potentially spell the destruction of internal applications which reside within the “Facebook chrome”. If I can view a list of all applications/websites that support this new standard provided by Myspace, isn’t that just as good as an internal application directory?

So what will Facebook’s response be? They are going to have to open up and open up quick. If Myspace’s new standard gains any sort of traction, they could become the dominant player in managing a centralized location of user profile data. This is awesome because it is a wake up call for Facebook and it is going to prevent any sort of delay in the continued data portability movement. Facebook is now on the defensive and they are going to have to come back swinging.

My prediction? Look for an announcement in the next 4 weeks in which Facebook will announce the launch of a similar standard.

For Application Developers
The social application industry changes every 6 weeks to be honest. This is just another consideration for these developers. For now this announcement should only be considered hype. Until the new social control panel launches, developers should continue as though this announcement never took place. Once this standard is launched applications no longer theoretically need to exist within a social networking site.

Instead, applications can be extended to their own stand alone applications or external websites. As i wrote yesterday afternoon, it is the invisible social network concept that Charlene Li has been talking about for months. This is great in theory but as of now it is still just theory.

For Open Standards
Currently the only open standard that Myspace is embracing is oAuth, which is “an open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.” In other words it enables external applications to communicate securely. Unfortunately they won’t be supporting OpenID for now which means while you can transport profile data, you won’t be able to use a single login.

True open standard evangelists tend to be highly cynical about corporate intentions with “data portability.” Whenever a company says that they are “embracing open standards,” they are really saying that they will enable other sites to access their data and help them extend their control on data beyond their own website. For open standards this is a step in the right direction but I still don’t own my data, Myspace does.

Word of Caution
Just because Myspace says they are doing something doesn’t mean they are. All they provided as proof of existence was one screenshot that was published on Techcrunch. Last time Myspace announced their platform at the Web 2.0 Summit, it took them months to actually deliver a functional platform. That platform still has its problems and for Myspace to suddenly launch a robust data portability standard is a little more than spectacular.

The cynic in me says that this could have been an announcement to try to force Facebook to do something that they don’t need to do right away. It will require Facebook to rapidly reallocate their resources (if they weren’t already working on this type of project) and would hopefully slow their momentum, if Myspace is lucky.

No matter how realistic it is for this new Data Availability initiative to launch within weeks, Myspace has just made a stand and it is a historic one in the world of Data Portability. This announcement also highlights how fragile the world of social applications has become. Let’s be honest, why would I put my app within Facebook or Myspace when I can now put it on my own site?

Last night, Twitter made a subtle change to their website: you can now view other peoples’ followers. While not significant, I used to frequently wonder why Twitter doesn’t let me see who’s following other users. While browsing through Mike Arrington’s 16,000+ followers or Veronica Belmont’s 19,000+ followers would take days, it helps users get a whole picture of individuals’ full social network.

Browsing through somebody else’s followers is also a great way to find other interesting users. While most people on Twitter still seem to be early adopters and interested in social media, if the site ever goes mainstream, having a complete picture of social connections on the site will be useful in mapping clusters of individuals. Aside from that there isn’t much that can be accomplished by viewing other peoples’ followers.

One feature that would be useful for leveraging the complete picture of the Twitter social graph would be friend recommendations. Twitter has continued to experience explosive growth over the past month according to the most recent Alexa charts. As the site crosses the chasm into mainstream adoption it will be interesting to see if the site can maintain reliability (which has already been highly criticized).

Do you see any other uses for accessing other users’ list of followers?

As I’ve been writing over the past couple days, LinkedIn is rumored to be in the middle of a round of fundraising which values the company at $1 billion. Many were wondering what that money would be used for though. Eric Eldon is reporting that LinkedIn may use the money to try and enter the enterprise software space, extending beyond their existing social networking model.

This would make a lot of sense considering the demographic currently on LinkedIn. There are also a lot of services that LinkedIn could build into their site. As Eric speculates, it could include a competing software service to Salesforce.com. I doubt this though considering Salesforce.com is one of LinkedIn’s platform launch partners. What do I think is more likely?

I would argue that LinkedIn would be a great platform for building out a conference management platform. The site should dominate everything related to professional networking. As of now, they have added few features since they launched almost 5 and a half years ago. While they have upgraded the design and have added answers and company profile pages, it has been an extremely slow evolution.

This hasn’t hurt the site’s growth though. If anything it may have potentially furthered the site’s phenomenal growth over the past 12 months. While LinkedIn’s purpose of a new round is completely speculation at this point, entering the software as a service space makes a lot of sense especially since they have millions of users available to directly market to.

Yesterday I “revealed” LinkedIn’s plan for global domination. While it wasn’t much of a plan and instead a confession of my belief that LinkedIn will be extremely successful with their platform, there was a lot of buzz surrounding LinkedIn yesterday. Venturebeat began a rumor that LinkedIn might get acquired due to a board meeting going over.

Later in the day Techcrunch reported that there was some legitimacy to the rumors saying that their sources informed them that LinkedIn was being pitched by Allen & Co. at $1 billion for a new round of venture financing. The round was being led by Dave Wehner who led the sale of Bebo for $850 million to AOL.

This is pretty big news as the valuation of top social networking sites continues to skyrocket. As I mentioned yesterday, LinkedIn has been receiving CPM (cost per thousand views) ad rates as high as $75. As of yet, this is probably the highest rate in the industry and much of it is due to the premium demographic that they are targeting. While I’m not quite sure why the company needs to raise more money, a $1 billion valuation is completely reasonable given Facebook’s recent $15 billion valuation.

There’s no word on when a possible round would be closing but it will be interesting to see if this speculation turns out to be true.

Thanks to a tweet from Evan Williams earlier today, I went and checked out a new site called Fuelfrog. The site is an extremely simple way for tracking your gas mileage via Twitter. The upside of this is obvious: it’s a quick and easy way to track your mileage. When I’m sitting in the car, prior to filling up a new tank I can simply type in the mileage on my odometer and the price per gallon and the number of gallons filled from the last time.

One downside to this is that when you get to the gas station to fill up your tank, you don’t remember what you paid last time. This is why I would suggest that Fuelfrog provide the opportunity back fill information. Rather than having to remember the price paid per gallon and number of gallons purchased from last time, it will simply apply those numbers for the next time you fill up and apply the current mileage to the previous entry. This would streamline things extremely well.

While I haven’t had extensive experience with this tool yet, I’m going to begin using it regularly. The one downside is that by using this tool via Twitter, I will expose my fuel budget to the world. While this isn’t really a significant portion of my budget, I wouldn’t use Twitter to track all of my expenses. I’m not sure what useful information will pop-up but I’m sure something will. Integration with Twitter is genius and I can see a whole set of other services implementing a similar integration in the near future.

Do you think this application is useful? What other types of applications do you think would be useful through integration with Twitter?

Last May, Facebook announced that they were launching their platform for any developer to build applications on top of the Facebook social network. The opportunity was too big to give up and almost immediately, Facebook had an onslaught of 60,000 developers all trying to get a piece of the action. A few developers became overnight millionaires leaving others to continue their search for gold.

Almost a year later, many developers still haven’t found their gold and Facebook is still left trying to figure out how they are going to begin making serious cash flow that justifies their $15 billion valuation. It appears that LinkedIn may have taken advantage of the shadow cast by Facebook as the press and blogosphere buzzed about everything Facebook (myself included).

I at one point went so far as to suggest that LinkedIn would soon see its end as Facebook took up its role as the social network of choice for professionals. Boy was I wrong! As I wrote last week, LinkedIn’s growth has surpassed Facebook. Not only did their growth surpass Facebook but according to Alley Insider, LinkedIn is also earning CPMs as high as $75.

Whether or not the numbers are true, LinkedIn has figured out a way to capitalize on their highly valuable user base. I would suggest that they are about to further this with the launch of their application platform. A few months back they announced a few launch partners including Salesforce.com, but stated that even at its full capacity, platform developers would be limited as well as applications.

Get ready to see applications that provided extended utility with mobile phone integration, applications that promote high end goods and services (AMEX, Ritz Carlton, etc) and apps that help your overall experience on LinkedIn a better one. While they will never be as large as Facebook or Myspace, they have no need to be. They can always point at Facebook and Myspace and argue that those two platforms are for games whereas LinkedIn is for business.

There’s no way around this and businesses are also taking note. Different platforms work for different demographics and while Facebook would like to have the largest mapping of the social graph, the reality is that business connections are still taking place on LinkedIn. As long as LinkedIn can keep their platform strictly for business and can maintain their select demographic profile, they will continue to produce more value per user on the site.

Want to become a rockstar? Perhaps you want to pose nude in Playboy. Whatever your dreams and aspirations are, social media can help you get there. In the past few days, I’ve received multiple press releases surrounding individuals becoming the next star. Recently, Jason Calacanis held the Mahalo Daily VLOG Idol competition.

Last week Alicia Keys decided to outsource the search for her backup singer to MySpace. You can go check out her MySpace page for details. Playboy also announced last week that they have outsourced the search for their 55th playmate via YouTube. I took a look at the responses so far and they are pretty entertaining.

Outsourcing the search for talent to social media can be a big gamble. Jason Calacanis for instance received a number of submissions via YouTube but none of them were selected. Instead they decided to do in house auditions. After 1 month and over 62,000 views of the Playboy Playmate search, there have been only 4 responses. My guess is that Playboy will have to look for a new source for their search.

While I think social media can be a good source for finding talent, the best talent search still requires in person auditions. Just listen to the top performers on MySpace karaoke and you’ll quickly notice that it is still difficult to judge the quality of their singing due to effects and the quality of the microphone the singers choose. There are very few examples of people that have made the jump from social media from prime time successfully. Do you know of any successful examples?

The other day while attending a Meetup event I had a discussion with a well known blogger, writer, internet personality when he began talking about some hate ‘mail’ he had been receiving via twitter. Apparently someone had read several of his blog posts, disliked them, and decided to express their anger via twitter.

I started talking with the blogger and I began to wonder if bloggers are perhaps too accessible via the web. Think about it like this: if an editor or journalist writes a story that you disagree with the best you can do is write the paper and hope an editor prints the letter you wrote. In the end the person who wrote the story is most likely the gate keeper on any criticism that posted about their work.

Bloggers however open themselves to personal attack by the very nature of the medium that they work on. Bloggers pride themselves on their accessibility and their connection with their readers. This presents and interesting problem for the blogger.

How much is he or she willing to say in their blog if they must fear reprisal from their readers.This reprisal also brings up the point of harassment vs criticism and if a blogger can be criticized without being harassed. I have been exposed to both criticism of journalists and criticism of bloggers.

I have to say the criticisms of bloggers are much more personal than that of journalists. When someone criticizes a journalist the attack is often on the journalist’s ideas. When someone attacks a blogger, they often attack the blogger personally.

As more and more people enter the social world as bloggers and online personalities the attacks of ideas and ideals will begin to become more frequent. While bloggers are making themselves public figures by entering the public arena, should there be some form of blogger protection?

Should bloggers have to fear public reprisal of their opinions or should we find a way to have stronger journalist style protections for them? Have you as a blogger or an social entity ever faced harassment via a reader? What was you story? I would like to know.