Could Google Friend Connect be a MySpace killer?
Social networking has entered an interesting phase. There’s a ton of them, for starters. The launch of a new social networking website with “awesome web 2.0 features” and “media sharing capabilities” won’t even illicit a slow, drawling yawn anymore. There’s simply too many of them out there already, with titans MySpace, Facebook, and a handful of others soaking up market share.
This state of being has prompted entrepreneurs and web companies to therefore bring social networking features to people rather than create a destination social networking website presence. Ning allows people to create their “own” social network “for free in seconds.” Ning’s easy-to-use DIY social networking platform is doing hot business – it’s rocking a sub-500 rank on Alexa these days.
So of course our good friends at Google have been watching this with great interest. And as of tonight, a “preview release” of Google Friend Connect will be available here.
What they’re doing is intriguing: allow website publishers to easily add social networking features to their existing website by adding a few lines of code. The hope is that the lure of “user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community” will let publishers do what they do best while providing low maintenance “social features” to their sites.
A Washington Post piece uses musician Ingrid Michaelson’s site as an example, and this is where I finally get around to trying to answer the question I asked as the title to this story.
If a musician like Michaelson can easily promote herself on her own website, provide information about shows and CDs, and provide places for fans to chat, interact, post reviews and pictures… why would she need MySpace again?
The mountain that is MySpace was and is built on the backs of people just like Michaelson, let’s remember. Musicians signed up there because of the ease and lack of expense to set up a site with social networking tools. And to be sure, there’s plenty of reason for musicians to maintain a presence there for some time to come because of its huge and worldwide audience.
But if fans of Ingrid Michaelson have the choice of participating in her community at her MySpace page or her own site with equivalent social networking features, I think many will end up choosing the latter.
And as Mashable notes: “In practice, this means that anyone will be able to log in, for example, with their OpenID on some blog, and converse with their Gtalk, Facbeook, or Plaxo friends. The web as a platform, it’s finally happening, folks.”
This makes a number of assumptions, of course. Will publishers adopt and stick with Google Friend Connect? Will the features be equal or better than those available at a MySpace or Facebook? Will interacting with Google’s social features be easy and intuitive for the average user?
Ifs aside, Google Friend Connect has the potential to take social networking to a new and more “distributed phase” and potentially put some scare into the existing kings of the MySpace mountain.
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