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. In other words 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. Which is a big deal for those of us who have more than just one social networking site..which most of us do..Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it. Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may – MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined…We shall see on Monday..
