When Google launched their Friend Connect service publicly last week, they one-upped Facebook by providing publishers with an easy to install widget on their site for instantly creating a community. While the features weren’t robust, it made it so that anybody could instantly implement the service on their site. In contrast, Facebook rolled out their service with the a few partners, many of which have still yet to go live.
(more…)

The battle for the social web has been playing out over the past few months but much of it has been invisible to those that are less technical. Today, Google announced that they will begin providing limited access to an API for an OpenID identity provider. This means Google users will be able to login to sites that support OpenID with their Google accounts.

This is a significant announcement for Google and for the open web. While I could attempt to place some sort of arbitrary divider between the open web and the social web, for discussion purposes, the social web is working to make the internet more open. As such both are substantially integrated and can be used interchangeably.

How Does Google OpenID Compete With Facebook?

The battle over single sign on is a significant one. If you haven’t been following OpenID and the single sign on trend over the past couple years, here’s a brief summary: users are finding it hard to remember the logins for every site they register for. As such, companies are racing to provide services that make it easy for users to login with their regular email address.

Facebook is preparing to launch their Connect service to the masses, making it possible for users to register for a site by using their Facebook account and without disclosing any personally identifiable information.
The Pros
There are some clear benefits from using Facebook Connect. For one, websites get access to a user’s news feed and the ability to virally distribute content and user activities through that feed. Second, companies get the “benefit” of placing a Facebook login button on their site. Why is this beneficial? Well, Facebook is rapidly becoming one of the most recognized brands on the web.

The Cons
For any company, using Facebook Connect doesn’t solve all your problems. The primary downside of using Facebook Connect is that you don’t get access to personally identifiable information of that user. I want to have access to a user’s email address so I can contact them in the future. Unfortunately Facebook prevents that. If you want to read more on this check out my article from July about Facebook Connect as OpenID without email.

There Can Only Be One Login

So I really haven’t answered my last question which was: how does Google OpenID compete with Facebook? Well it’s in an abstract sort of way. When you go to register for a site, you are only going to register with one account. Soon enough, you will be able to select from a number of sites that you specify as the center of your identity. As pictured in the image to the left, this is how a theoretical registration form would look.

No longer will you have to enter all your information into fields, instead, that information will come from your identity provider. OpenID is supposed to tie your identity back to a URL but Google has implemented their own version in typical Google style. The point being here is not to debate Google’s implementation of OpenID though, instead to illustrate that your identity can be tied to external accounts.

We’re In it For the Long Haul

In November of last year, I wrote that the email would become the center of social networks. One year later we are seeing this happen as Google and Yahoo! implement new services for the open web. Yesterday Yahoo! announced their open platform which includes a single sign on-like feature and today Google has announced their own version of OpenID support.

This is just the beginning though and ultimately, much of this will require user adoption. I’m guessing that there will soon be a registration “widget” similar to the way that Disqus handles my comments, another party will handle my registrations. As long has I get to have my own database filled with user data, that’s all that matters.

It’s going to take some time but I’d imagine in the next 12 months there will be a huge shift toward a centralized registration system that everybody can use and developers can quickly implement. It’s exciting to see the big players getting involved and while each step can be criticized for its imperfect implementation, I’d assert that this is once again a big step in the right direction.

Yesterday Google rolled out the new version of their Blogsearch product with a surprising new feature: a blog aggregator. The aggregator sorts all news articles being linked to across their blog index based on popularity and time. Many are calling the new Google Blogsearch the “Techmeme Killer” but honestly this is flat out inaccurate. If you browse through the top stories on Google Blogsearch they are all around 17 hours old.

Techmeme in contrast has the ability to show you the latest stories within minutes of them being written. One thing that is clear though is the increasing importance of content aggregators.

The Importance of Aggregators

As content on the web continues to grow exponentially, consumers have turned to content aggregators to filter their information. While traditional media outlets like the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and others often serve as a filter of content for us, the limitless user-generated content has made it more challenging to filter information.

As the trend from individual websites toward web-based applications continues, one of the most important applications will be the content aggregator. While bloggers and professional journalists have turned to RSS feeds for organizing content, we have realized that content consumption simply doesn’t scale. Each internet savvy consumer currently has their own aggregator that they prefer to visit but I would suggest that all consumers in the information age will soon have their own news aggregator application that they take on the go and access regularly.

The Perfect Aggregator Has Yet to be Made

There is a long way to go before there is a “perfect” content aggregator. One thing that I would suggest is more valuable on Techmeme and Memeorandum in contrast to Google Blogsearch is that the former aggregators include traditional media outlets in their index. In contrast, Google Blogsearch is completely limited to blogs.

In the future I expect to be able to instantly load a single aggregator which includes the most popular items distributed through my favorite media outlets, social aggregators, social networks, and every other source that I visit for the latest content. For now we need to visit our favorite aggregators daily to find the best content. Soon enough, we will have a way to access all our content from a single source.

For now though, Google Blogsearch is yet one more place for finding the latest information being discussed around the blogosphere.

Today Caroline McCarthy posted about a new feature which is being added to Blogger-based blogs and makes them inherently more social. It’s a simple widget-like feature which enables you to view other people in the network that are following that blog. It is extremely similar to the MyBlogLog community features and it extends Google Friend Connect.

One interesting thing about this new feature is that you can import the “Blogs I’m Following” directly into your Google Reader. I’m not quite sure how useful this feature is for me since a large portion of the blogs I’m reading aren’t hosted by Blogger but I figure a lot of people will begin using it. The shift toward a more social web is clearly continuing and Google is one of the companies leading the push.

The only problem with this new feature is that it doesn’t extend to blogs outside of Google. I want a single identity and a single community on the web and this surely isn’t a step in that direction. Then again we can’t make all of our decisions with data portability as the primary end-goal. Now you have yet one more way to interact with people you don’t know on the web thanks to Blogger!

What does the future hold for social blogs? You’ve got me! It’s Friday so I’ll leave you all to figure out the future of the social web. Everybody, including Google, appears to like throwing kinks in the whole equation. With all this socializing taking place on the web it’s too complicated to figure how it all will end up in the end given that it’s the Friday before a 3-day weekend!

If you weren’t spending enough time on the website you are reading, Google is trying to provide a new reason to stay a little longer: Lively. Lively is a new virtual world system for websites. The system is currently only available for Windows users though so for all you Mac users, you are just going to have to wait. What’s so spectacular about these virtual worlds?

Not much really aside from being able to interact with other avatars on any given website. I spent a good hour trying to get Lively working properly yesterday and finally pulled it off after a reboot of my computer. The software appears to work well if you are looking to build a virtual home on your site. I’m just not quite sure how this really helps improve user interaction though.

Rather than actually talking with people via the GChat back-end chat system which users talk over, most people end up moving around and clicking on random items in the virtual world. In theory, each site has their own custom world that they build and different conversations can take place in them. I’m just not so sure that this is the best platform for encouraging dialog. Instead it’s a great way to look at some virtual eye candy.

If you have a PC and want to be part of the Social Times virtual world, check out the embedded virtual world below. I can see this having larger implications in the long run but for now this is clearly an experiment which could end a number of small startups focused on people building their virtual homes. I don’t think this is going to attract many of the users from Secondlife though. We’ll have to wait and see.

A new Google patent was approved last week which sounds eerily similar to my April fools joke earlier this year. The new patent is for, “A computer-implemented method for displaying advertisements to members of a network comprises identifying one or more communities of members, identifying one or more influencers in the one or more communities, and placing one or more advertisements at the profiles of one or more members in the identified one or more communities.”

It’s the exact type of technology that Jeremy Zawodny previously described as well as a number of other industry thought leaders. The new technology will be able to “identify the influencers from among the members of a community. This may provide advertisers with the option of targeting either all members in the community or advertising only on the profile of the influencer, thereby targeting the entire community.”

So how is Google going to leverage their new “FriendRank” (a name already trademarked by social ad network, SocialMedia) patented technology? Technically, the only social network they own is Orkut which is popular in countries that don’t have as large of advertising budgets as the U.S. Google also has an agreement to monetize MySpace as well so perhaps this new technology will be used to help monetize the under-performing inventory on the largest U.S. social network.

The new technology is clearly reminiscent of the personal CPM that I’ve previously discussed on both this site and AllFacebook. As the patent describes, “An influencer may receive financial incentives from advertisers in exchange for permission to display advertisements on the member’s profile.” The systems will also be used to help group individuals based on their shared interests and target them based on those interests.

This is something that Facebook already supports with their SocialAds service but one of the biggest downfalls is that some users may not update their interests. This system will theoretically encourage “members of communities in online social networks to enrich the content on their profiles. The presence of high quality content relevant to shared interests on a member’s profile increases the popularity of the member in the community and improves a member’s chances of being an influencer.”

Whether or not this system will provide a greater incentive than Facebook and other sites already provide is unknown but if updating your profile results in earning more money, I could definitely see this system working. Google has repeatedly stated that social networks continue to provide under-performing advertising inventory. Perhaps this is their solution to combat the problem.

Patent Image 1

Patent Image 2

Patent Image 3

Today Google announced the redesign of their highly popular iGoogle start page. The start page will have a FriendFeed like feed that shows shared feed items from your contacts in Google reader, their recent photos uploaded to Picasa, Google Talk status messages and shared iGoogle gadgets. Sound familiar? It’s pretty much the same thing as other social networks except that your homepage is your startpage for everything.

Google has reduced the newsfeed down to a single feature. Honestly, this makes a lot of sense and I could see Google being successful with this strategy. The only downfall to the new startpage? Well, it’s limited to Google owned items. Currently there is no way to import activities that your friends are involved in else where on the web.

One other substantial addition is the creation of canvas pages for Google gadgets. That means that Google gadgets function similarly to Facebook applications as well as the new Google Friend Connect canvas pages. It appears that the concept of canvas pages has become pervasive throughout the social web. While I don’t know how many users interact with iGoogle on a daily basis, I know it is in the millions.

That means Google has now developed a way to compete directly with Facebook and other social networks for the first page someone loads when they sit down at their computer.

Google, once foreign to targeting based on social data, has launched Google Ad Planner. The service is targeted at media buyers and enables them to select ad placements on various sites based on demographic information as well as traffic data. Currently the service is limited to 4 types of demographic data: age, gender, education and household income.

Compare that to Facebook which currently offers targeting based on 8 variables: location, gender, age, profile keywords (found in interests, favorite music, movies and more), education status, workplaces, relationship status and what gender they are interested in dating. While Facebook offers more variables, Google’s information is broken down in to the categories most frequently targeted by media buyers.

The real question is if this is going to cut into Facebook’s ad revenue or prevent them from attracting marketers more effectively. Fox Interactive Media has a similar offering to Facebook’s called HyperTargeting which leverages MySpace profile to segment users. According to MySpace advertisers have been increasingly demanding HyperTargeting which has also been producing higher CPMs.

Google needs to figure out a way to capture some of this market and their new Ad Planner service appears to do that. While the social web continues to wait on a breakthrough advertising service, Google is using traditional advertising segmentation to make spending easier for media buyers. Do you agree that this new service will reduce the attractiveness of SocialAds?

Google has announced that seven new social networks in China have been added to the OpenSocial standard: 51.com, 51wan.com, Douban.com, Hainei.com, Tianji.com, Xiaonei.com and YiQi.com. These are all large social networks, one of which, Xiaonei.com, appears to be a direct rip off of Facebook. The company also recently raised $430 million making it better funded then Facebook itself.

I would imagine that any hopes of Facebook joining the OpenSocial movement have been eliminated for the time being with Xiaonei being announced as one of the large partners. As OpenSocial continues to expand its reach, the battle between the Facebook platform and OpenSocial continues. While most developers building on Facebook have been focused on the impending platform changes, OpenSocial developers have been hard at work trying to extend their reach with the launch of each new supporting platform.

OpenSocial has been extremely successful with gaining momentum recently announcing that MyAOL would be supporting OpenSocial and that more AOL products will also support the standard in the near future. If there is a lesson to be learned here, I’d say that Facebook needs to have a platform evangelist that also goes and pitches their platform to other sites. They are ultimately losing the battle to OpenSocial when it comes to platform adoption.

There has been little discussion surrounding yesterday’s Facebook announcement of fbOpen, the open-source version of the Facebook platform. Many have speculated about the intention of fbOpen and have boiled it down to a response to Google’s OpenSocial initiative. It is difficult to predict what will happen now that the platform has been open-sourced but it appears that Facebook has moved beyond licensing the platform and is instead making it a free-for-all so that developers can have their application run on other websites.

To me, Facebook’s release of their open-source platform is also an acknowledgment that the world does not just exist in blue and white (Facebook’s colors). So if Facebook knows that there is a world beyond their borders, why don’t they just support the OpenSocial initiative? Facebook claims that it’s because of privacy reasons but there has to be something beyond privacy that is really a concern for them.

Mike Arrington seems to think that it is a last ditch effort by Facebook to become the defacto standard of the social web. Unfortunately for Facebook I think it is a losing battle. At this point I’d say that the majority of users have picked their social network of choice and will use one site most often. Additionally, Facebook selected a somewhat restrictive license as Matt Asay points out.

As I wrote this morning though, all of this is ultimately a stupid, drawn-out game of chess (or poker). I wrote, “The reality is that Facebook will find that no matter how much money they have in the bank, there is no way that they can innovate faster than the overall market.” Facebook shouldn’t try to out smart Google and others by participating in their game.

Instead Facebook should simply open up and move on to the real issue at hand: figuring out a way to make money on social networks. After all is said and done we’ll all be singing O.A.R.’s “That Was a Crazy Game of Poker.”