Google stumbles into the social networking crossfire
In one corner, weighing in at a respectable $15 billion, the reigning champ, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook!
And the new challenger—we’ve all heard his name on the streets and he actually helped us discover Zuckerberg—weighing in at a hefty $150 billion, the ad-toting, search-optimizing, float-like-a-betafly Eric Schmidt of Google!
Let’s get ready to rumble!
Wait a minute—what’s this? It looks like Schmidt and Zuckerberg are not fighting, they’re tag-teaming! And there’s Ramu Yalamanchi of Hi5, David Glazer of OpenSocial, and Kevin Rose of Digg coming up to join them!
Will the whispered Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace giant allegiance challenge them next week? Only time will tell…
What am I talking about? The cage-match between Google’s new product offering, Friend Connect, and the answer that will come in the next few months from their competitors and adversaries.
Last night Google released their cure for the internet’s social networking addiction: universal integration. Wait, what? That’s right, Google has found a way for the average website owner to integrate social networking capabilities into their sites without doing any coding at all! Pretty soon you will see your favorite (currently static) how-to-age-cheese website integrating social networking options like comments, uploading pictures, friends, and updates of your activity on their site sent to your favorite social networks (Facebook, hi5, Orkut, etc.). All they have to do is sign up through Google Friend Connect and choose the little applications they want to add to their site. Google takes care of the rest!
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a game changer. Suddenly po-dunk Bar-B-Que Shack’s one-page website can integrate comments about their latest BBQ recipe, have their regulars upload pictures from last night’s wrangle-fest, and connect with BBQ lovers all over the country. It seems dumb, but then again so did searching for information on a computer when you could just find it in your local library. This, my forward-thinking friends, is a serious game changer.
Wanna see it in action? Check out these sample sites that Google created and watch the video introduction.
So there you have it, Google is entering the Social Networking arena with guns blazing.
But what does this mean for the general internet community? In my opinion, all good things. I have a few websites, and I would love to have user comments, user-generated content, and user connections all happening in the background—without me having to moderate, code, or otherwise handle the implementation. It’s actually kind of like a dream come true—in theory.
But so far, from what I have seen in the example sites and the videos, this first go-around of Google Friend Connect is—in a word—clunky. You can tell that the idea behind it is beautiful and full of potential, but that the coders forgot to pass it on to the make-it-look-sexy people before they released it. To give them credit, it is still in the very, very early stages. I just can’t wait until this can be used in sites all over the web. I’ll stumble upon a random karate-by-cats website and I can immediately connect with other people who love the board-chopping meows as well—and my activity on karate-by-cats will be automatically posted to my Facebook profile! And keep in mind, this is just the first iteration of this new functionality—the real gold lies at the end of the Google rainbow (somewhere over in California, I’m sure).
Look forward to lots of news about Google Friend Connect—great work Google! Now, about those karate chopping LOLcats…
1 month ago