Mele’s Musings

Three’s Company Or Three’s A Crowd? Google To Launch “Friend Connect” On Monday

All the big social networks agree that having one central profile is of value to customers.  Too bad they can’t agree on who will own that profile.

picture: Google Images

Article excerpt:    Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.  MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).  Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. 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. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.
the rest: washingtonpost.com

Musing:  Two questions:  do users really want one central profile, and if so, which of these companies will they trust to own that profile?  All of these companies want to own user data, but users may not be so flexible in allowing them to.  I would want to know how much information they share without my consent, and who owns this data – me or them.  If not me, and if it is hard to control, I don’t want any part of it.  We will have to wait and see if either of these pan out – seems like another format war a la VHS vs. Beta and HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray.