Geoff Evason

Google announced FirendConnect today. From what I’ve read, it looks like it’s a set of social ‘gadgets’ that people can embed into their websites to help bring social networking to sites that were once, well, unsocial.

If you like demo videos (and don’t we all) or you like odd guacamole references, check out this video post overview from google:

I’ve signed up for the preview release. I have not got a response yet (I’m sure they are getting lots of requests). I’m excited to see how I might be able to add it to MomentVille. The first 2 things that really interest me are

1. Sharing Photos
2. The Activity Stream for people posting on the site.

I do see 1 immediate problem though. From the demo it appears that a lot of the gadgets are javascript based. A lot of sites won’t allow users to embed javascript for security reasons. I image it won’t be long before someone makes flash social based gadgets for FriendConnect.

The launch of this comes very close to MySpace’s DataAvailability launch and Facebook’s Connect announcement. It appears, in many ways, that all 3 of these efforts are attempts to push one’s ‘network’ beyond the existing website into the web as a whole.

To date I like Google’s FirendConnect approach the best since it doesn’t seem to be tied to any one particular identity, where as MySpace & Facebook seem to be aiming for the top spot as master identity manager.