MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – Shakespeare famously wrote “All the world’s a stage.” On Tuesday, Google did what it could to update the thought for the 21st Century: “All the Web’s a social network.”With new software released on Tuesday, Google hopes to make part of its vision for a Brave New Web reality. The free software allows any website to become a social network, complete with many of the fraternization tools found on mega-social-sites like MySpace and Facebook.
Google hopes the new product, known as Friend Connect, will encourage webmasters to create destinations that will overcome the major criticism of existing social sites: social networks are “walled gardens” that allow users to interact only while they remain on the networks’ websites. With Friend Connect, Google hopes to touch off a digital revolution by tearing down virtual walls and allowing like-minded people to connect across sites all over the Web.
“We’re in the middle of a huge change,” David Glazer, an engineering director working on Google’s evolving social initiative, told the Washington Post. “Wherever people go on the Web, they want to have their friends with them, and [Friend Connect] makes it possible.”
Of course, any idea as radical as Web-wide social connections is bound to draw criticism. Friend Connect is no exception. Some see a thorough lack of altruism.
“The fact that so many people were using Facebook made Google nervous,” SearchEngineLand.com Editor in Chief Danny Sullivan told the Post. “They watched this site have explosive growth, and they don’t have a competitive product. It’s not that Google is thinking, ‘Gosh, all these people need help.’ They’re thinking, ‘We’re behind on social networks.’”
Ray Valdes, a research director for Gartner, added, “Google has been a fast follower behind Facebook, but they’re still Google. This will have an impact for sure.”
Friend Connect is designed to be easy to set up and use. All webmasters must do to enable the product’s features is add a snippet of code to their pages. The underlying software runs on Google’s servers and uses Google’s bandwidth.
According to a posting on Google’s official blog, Friend Connect “lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You’ll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. And quite simply, you’ll be able to do things together.”
Musician Ingrid Michaelson is enthusiastic about being accepted into Google’s limited trial of the new product. She’s sees promotional benefit in Friend Connect, because it will allow her fans to recruit new fans among friends without leaving her site. It also will allow people previously unaware of her work to discover it through social networks that may have nothing to do with her music.
“Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other,” Glazer noted.
For at least the first few weeks, Friend Connect will be available only to a few dozen websites handpicked to test the software. However, Google has established a waiting list of user-hopefuls at Google.com/friendconnect.
“We’re going to keep things pretty limited at first so we can gather feedback from site owners, developers, and users, but, in the weeks ahead, we’ll be reaching out to more site owners and adding more social apps to the gallery,” Product Manager Mussie Shore wrote on the company’s blog.
