To socialize these days, hundreds of millions of people every month turn to social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. But what if the Web itself worked as a social network, asks the Washington Post.
At the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Google will launch a new product called “Friend Connect,”, a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.
It’s the third major “open” social architecture announced in nearly as many days, says Techcrunch. MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday and Facebook Connect was announced on Friday.
Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect (the site is still unavailable), will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications.
The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services.
At the core of Friend Connect are three emerging social standards–OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial, says C/Net.
“Friend Connect provides wizardlike pages. Webmasters just fill in the information, select social apps, copy code, paste, and save. No coding is required. It passes the ‘easy’ test, and it does something useful,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.
It provides features such as user registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, and reviews, as well as OpenSocial applications.
Google’s Blog says independent musician Ingrid Michaelson has added music features from iLike with Google Friend Connect and is now able to run the iLike OpenSocial application on her website.
As a result, starting tonight, fans who visit Ingrid’s site can connect with their friends without having to leave the site.
Related Dailywireless articles include Mobile Social Nets Grow.
