Standardizing Social Networking Elements on the Web
One of the most popular aspects of the best web sites today is Social Networking, or the ability to identify your friends (people you know who also use the web site), share information with them, and interact with them. Some sites even let you see into your friends' set of friends (your second-level or second-tier friends), and beyond.
Some web sites are dedicated to these features which we all hear about constantly (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). But these features are making their way to regular web sites that have specific purposes, such as picture sharing (Flickr.com), News sites (Digg.com), and even T-shirt companies (Threadless.com).
The Problem
The problem, so far, has been that adding Social Networking features to a web site required all custom-design and programming, all the database design and implementation, including creating a custom API using whatever protocol(s) they felt like using, to allow other people to access their information from the site.
If Flickr, let's say, adds some interesting features for their users, those features are only available on the Flickr web site, not elsewhere. Users must consciously log into Flickr, to use the features.
What's more, if you write code to access the Flickr API, that code will only work with Flickr and Flickr's features - you must completely write a different set of API-accessing code to talk to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and the other services you might want to access.
That's a lot of programming.
In addition, every site generally has their own login system - the user must remember a different login and password for every different site they have access to. I personally have a list of over 150 different logins and passwords for different web sites I have access to - there's no way I could memorize all of that. (I choose not to use the same passwords on multiple sites).
Solution - Open Social
Well, open standards are finally coming out that can help this situation.
The first really exciting technology is Open Social, which Google came out with in late 2007. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
Open Social gives web developers the ability to create online social "Gadgets" or components that can be used on a variety of web sites with very little programming. You can write a Gadget for your own web site, and then register that Gadget on Google's central site to share with others. Your Gadget can then operate on many web sites such as Orkut, and others.
Gone are the days of having to write your own "login system", with a database backend. Open Social handles that for you, utilizing many login systems that other people likely already have accounts on.
Tracking each user's friends as a set of many-to-many associations is all handled for you now.
Logging into these systems is easy - because Google's written interfaces for many different login systems, whatever you already have will likely work with this system. Your Yahoo mail account will work, as will Google/Gmail Account, and many others. No more "one login/password for each web site"!
We're getting closer to the vision of "one login for all web sites" that OpenID/OpenAuth has created.
Problem
But that's only a partial solution. Sure, you can write miniature pieces of applications as Gadgets, that only run on a few web sites that have been programmed to work with Open Social.
But what if you already have a regular web site, and you'd like it to be a Social app too? To utilize a set of Gadgets that other people have already written? Right now that's still a fair amount of programming right there.
Solution - Google Friend Connect
Google Friend Connect solves this other half of the puzzle.
It gives any web site owner the ability to easily add other people's Social Networking Gadgets to their existing web site without any programming whatsoever.
You use a GUI to select which Gadgets would work well on your site, and then choose the background and foreground colors and a few other settings. A set of HTML code is generated, which you cut-and-paste onto your web page. And voila - a complete Social Networking aspect has been added to your web site! No database programming for you today.
Google Friend Connect has not been released as of this writing (May 2008), but is slated to be released soon.
You can watch the video demos of how Google Friend Connect is going to work. It looks truly awesome.
Once a web site has Google Friend Connect on it, when people log in and view a web page, they can choose a set of friends to recommend the page to. In the video their example is a Guacamole recipe web page, and the current user thinks about which of their friends likes guacamole, selects that set of people from their list of friends, and sends the link to them so easily.
How about that for attracting new traffic to your web site - your viewer's friends receiving an invite from their own friends, recommending they visit your site - from your web site! There's nothing more powerful than a referral like that.
You can sign up for beta-testing of Google Friend Connect. I signed up, and I would imagine there are a LOT of people already signed up by now. You should be thinking about one of your web sites that would benefit a lot by having Social Networking components added to it. The web-form you fill out asks various questions about the specific application you're going to use this for; you can say you're a Web Site Owner, an Application Developer, or Social Network Provider (that last role I don't totally understand yet).
You can tell that Google wants something in return - an awesome variety of applications they can advertise as supporting their new technology once it's released to the public.
Any unique and popular web site today that could benefit from social networking elements but don't have any yet, might be a good candidate for Google Friend Connect.
I can see that Social Networking elements will soon be on everyone's blog and home page, because of how easy it's going to be to add them.
More Info
Google's video of "Campfire One" (Open Social's release day): http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=9KOEbAZJTTk
Google's Open Social API is at: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
Open Social Partners: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/partners.html
Google Friend Connect examples, video and sign-up: http://www.google.com/friendconnect/
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