Google Friendconnect – first videos, first impressions

Google Friendconnect is :

• a Google-hosted social network
• on a site-by-site basis

Webmasters can:

• have their own social network
• have user management and apps packaged as opensocial widgets provided by Google
• Get reports on user signup and usage

Users can:

• sign in with several credential: Google account, Yahoo account Facebook, AIM…and OpenID – other sites coming (any OpenSocial container probably?)
• “link” your identity provider (from the above list) with “friend containers”: Facebook, Googletalk, or some open social containers like Hi5, Orkut etc (on Frienconnect level)
• Publish activity back to their social network

First reactions on Twitter and blogs were enthousiastic about the “openness”. Why?

• I guess because of the OpenID and other ways of authenticating?
• The fact that you decide on your way of authenticating on a site-by-site basis

Still….

• Google totally owns user-site signups, relationships, account linking…
• thus even more of your online behaviour
• (and gets yet another piece of tracking javascript all over the web?)

What I would be interested in:

• Self-hosted Friendconnect – or at least the Friendconnect provider of your choice
• So there would be an open implementation, like Shindig is an open OpenSocial Container implementation

Even more interesing:

• social network functionality inserted by the user’s browser, not by the site owner
• (so think Greasemonkey inserting opensocial apps communicating with the Friendconnect implementation of your choice)

Update: This quote from Techcrunch nails it:

Basically, what Friend Connect does is gather this data from big social networks in whatever way they make available and then presents it in a uniform way to third party sites. It also works as a pass-through between those third party sites and the big repositories of social data. This eliminates any programming hassles on the part of small Websites that want to tap into these social networks, but it also positions Google as the central switch connecting all of these different identity systems.

These are the Campfire (announcement) videos available on youtube – less interesting however (and no part2):

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4