Facebook must feel good. The day after Yahoo! announced that they will soon implement Facebook Connect across all their properties, Google announced the integration of Twitter into Google Friend Connect. While there are millions of users who have logged in through Google Friend Connect, it’s somewhat of a backward model for taking on Facebook in the ongoing identity wars.
Google Friend Connect is going after the long tail, while Facebook is going after the entire graph. To date there has not been a single mainstream media property to implement Google Friend Connect. Instead,millions of smaller sites have each implemented Google Friend Connect widgets, similar to Fan Box that Facebook already offers.
Those big name implementations of Facebook Connect however keeps the company’s identity platform in the press day after day, while Google Friend Connect gets brief spurts of attention. One can understand why Google feels so strongly about competing in the online identity wars. The primary reason is of course that the company doesn’t have an effective system of determining who our friends are (aside from their email services of course).
While it’s difficult to dismiss Google Friend Connect given their wide reach, the service doesn’t appear to be as strong of a competitor given their loosely structured data. While I’m sure there are plenty of people who would say Google Friend Connect is a formidable competitor, I would argue that they are running a distant second to Facebook.
For those who think that a distributed web could win, I’d say “Fat chance!” The main reason being that Facebook has the largest representation of the social graph and the more people they have, the greater the incentive is to join. This snowballs at a rapid pace, and right now there’s nobody close to matching Facebook’s image of the social graph.
Rather than ramble on about why Facebook will win the identity war, I’d simply emphasize how this is clearly a last ditch effort by Google despite the millions of people that have implemented the Friend Connect service. While implementing Twitter as another identity service is a useful feature, Google is essentially attempting to piece together a group of widgets to take on Facebook.
Do you think my dismissal of Google Friend Connect is an unfair assessment?
This seems to be all about which social site has the most useful
data on it’s members. Facebook clearly has the social graph
but Twitter can and will provide some added value to Google search results. Google will also encourage searchers to become
new Twitter members so we can receive “super search results”.
This will revamp Twitter’s slowing growth. Personally, I don’t think
this alliance will have much impact until Twitter improves the social
graph that it has for it’s community.
This site beinging a Facebook site it sounds to be that Nick O’Neill is a Facebook fanboy who believes in a walled garden reminiscent of The Iron Curtain, Great Wall of China, The Berlin Wall, North Korea/South Korea divide, the walls of Jericho, etc. You know eventually all wall come tumbling down. The foundation of the internet is openness and I am willing to bet that Facebook will open up if it is to ultimately survive and wants to continue to grow for the long term. It is just a matter of time a tiny green sprout tipped with a tiny white flower bud will come through Facebook’s concrete walls.
I think what first attracted me to this post was the diagram on top (looked like a mandala) but that’s actually what is attractive - the madalas of old seem to be good network diagrams of what is actually happening with identity management.
jojo,
You clearly don’t read all the articles that we post. I wrote about the Facebook wall disappearing the other day. http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-open-identity/
It’s not just one-sided on this blog
I just love that Jojo got a rise out of Nick aka fanboy. Great post, Nick. Keep up the good work!
Google Friend Connect is creepy