Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social
Later tonight Google will launch a new service called Friend Connect, aiming to "bring the social" to any page around the web. Unfortunately the service takes a bunch of open technical standards yearning to see the light of day through mass adoption and puts them in a dark little box where they will struggle to breathe.
Google could have worked with other large companies and with the creators of these standards (some are in the Data Portability Working Group that Google joined, for example) to tackle the hard questions around data exposure, integration and privacy. Instead they are pushing their Open Social standard around in an iframe. Easy is very good, but co-operation could have come up with something better than this.
The Plan
Friend Connect uses OpenID, oAuth and Open Social to let users log in to their favorite apps using a trusted ID provider and then access their friend info from those apps - all while on another website altogether. That could be any website that has chosen apps from the Open Social/ Friend Connect app gallery and pasted the iframe code onto their page.
The embrace of these standards is great news - but the implementation is wanting.
If you'd like to hear the press call, we've got it up on our podcast site ReadWriteTalk, or you can listen to it in this wonderful iframe below (feel the social!). My questions come in at around 19:00, press the "play now" link to listen. The first part is boring and scripted but the Q&A part is pretty fun.
Who's In?
Below is a splash page to-be for the Friend Connect service - you'll notice that Facebook friends are included in the discussion. Facebook isn't a participant in Open Social though, so we're not clear on how they are a part of this Open Social In a Box Initiative. Google says it's using the publicly available Facebook API. Google says that its Social Graph API, which indexes friends everywhere and that we called a creeping privacy violation - is not included in Friend Connect simply because they didn't need it. It's unclear on what information site owners will be able to put in their iframes.
You Can't Use it Yet
While the whole developer and publisher world is anxiously awaiting details from the launch tonight, Google is putting a damper on adoption by limiting the Friend Connect "preview release" to a handful of white listed apps and a short list of selected websites. The company says it has to prove it can scale the infrastructure (ooh, can Google scale? I don't know, better limit the approved users to just a tiny handful!) and it wants to see what kinds of features developers and site owners want to request. Apparently the company believes this feedback is best done by making said parties look from the outside and send emails guessing about what they'd like to see once they are let inside. This seems completely backwards to me.
You Can't Touch What's Inside the Magic Box
Site owners will be able to add Open Social apps to their web pages - sort of. They'll be able to display them inside an iframe, a separate web page inside a webpage. They won't be able to leverage that user data to change what they deliver themselves to their users.
Apps in an iframe may as well be a social sidebar ala Flock or Yoono. Those collections of social apps are probably more useful anyway.
Conversations Are Complicated
Google made it clear during their press call that they are aiming for the easiest, simplest and safest way to enable social apps to be integrated into other websites. It will take less than six months, they promise.
Let's be clear that it's not going to be easy to figure out how to enable all this user data to be mashed up in acceptably safe ways. We asked Google how they can assume that one user's friends on IMeem have permission to access their info out on other sites around the web. They said that users will have to be given the option whether to expose that info to third party sites or not, something we haven't seen any details on yet from the original source social networks. That would be even more difficult if the destination sites had read, much less write, access to that ported-in social networking data.
Everyone Is Talking, Though, Right?
Those hard questions are the ones that these companies are supposed to be working on together through the Data Portability Working Group, though. The Group has published best practices documents tackling a number of difficult questions already. Today when asked why all these companies were making separate announcements, though, Google said that the beauty of open standards is that companies don't have to talk. They can just meet up around interoperable technologies.
We're hoping that the biggest social companies in the world are talking, though. We'd like to see them complete and advance these standards, not just implement them by themselves, in a little box.
The Data Portability Working Group is a challenging situation and it may not be a surprise that Google and the other large players aren't spending as much time there as they are on engineering. The end results of the engineering though, are in this case and in the case of MySpace's announcement earlier this week, appear a fair cry short of the dreams that fuel the data portability community.
We'd like to see the social truly opened up and for all the vendors and consultants, large and small, to work together to get through the permissioning and safety questions that ought be be just small bumps on the road to a universe of innovation.
Comments
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Marshall,
Great post! You certainly raise some good concerns.
I'm a little more optimistic about this, but it will be hard to say until we can all really play with the different options from the gallery in our own personal sites.
- Sean
PS: For those interested in listening to the press call, we have syndicated it on our podcast site (which I host) ReadWriteTalk http://readwritetalk.com/2008/05/12/special-episode-friend-connect-conference-call/
Makes you wonder if Google's strategy is to hide as many things in their little dark box (Friend Connect, Search Algo), while touting how they are such a good corporate citizen, making the world a better place, blah blah.
Request this post be edited to NOT infer that the Data Portability Group has "ownership" or "control" over OpenID, OAuth and Microformats - they don't. If you are gonna chastise Google, then you have to chastise dataportability.org for the same reason.
"...First, Data Portability Group does NOT speak for the community as a whole, for any specific social network ( except MySpace ), or for any individuals except those who publicly align themselves with the group. On too many occasions to feel comfortable about, I’ve seen or read members of the Data Portability Group project claim authority far beyond any reasonable mandate, which to me have read like attempts to seize control and influence that not only isn’t justified, but that shouldn’t be ascribed to any individual or organization. I worry that this hubris is leading them to take more credit than they’re due, and in consequence, folks interested but previously uninitiated with any of the core technologies will be lead to believe that the Data Portability Group is responsible and in control of those technologies. Furthermore, if it is the case that people are mislead, I have little faith that folks from the Data Portability Group will prevent themselves from speaking on behalf of those technologies, leading to confusion and potential damage."
From: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/05/11/thoughts-on-dataportability/
Todd, I made a small edit that I hope clarifies that. The original post already had that same link to Messina's post too, fwiw. Thanks for commenting and good luck working on data portability, wherever you do it :)
The desire to capture user traffic is consistent in Google's technology policy. This is also the case e.g. with the release of their Google Book Search (GBS) API. There's a good discussion at the Library 2.0 Gang, including one of the GBS managers. see http://librarygang.talis.com/2008/04/08/april-2008-google-book/
The statement "the beauty of open standards is that companies don't have to talk" makes a ridiculous number of assumptions, and introduces serious risk into the likelihood of any successful collaboration.
It's unfortunate: there are so may passionate individuals who can make a real difference, yet this kind of corporate action can easily poison their efforts.
Once again Marshall shines through all the hyperbole and bulsh*t and refuses to drink the kool-aid. You, sir, are the god-damned man!
I have been very hesitant to take any of the big web companies announcements without a (very big) grain of salt. Google, MS, Facebook... what do these places have to gain by letting users own the information that directly pertains to themselves? Nothing. So therefor, why would they let that happen? The short answer: they won't. So what can they do? They can join the workgroups and write up neat little blog posts all around and get people excited about Data Portability and then, right in front of all of us, change the very definition of "portability". Webster would cringe.
God forbid users get the opportunity to "download" their profile (ala OPML, hCard/vCard, APML, XFN etc.) to actually make the data truly portable. Privacy is the users business (and truly a non-issue). If they don't want the data shared, they don't upload the file. An open standard spec is the true golden fleece, and it will enable ALL services great and small to participate and it will empower users to be free to roam the giant web with all their data, not just the "approved by google" version of the social web...
Boo, Google. We expected better from you. This is start-up material, not ivy league superpower material... and Google knows it. They are just hoping we don't catch on.
It really bothers me that Google keeps resorting to iframes for things like OpenSocial and now this... iframes have their place, but in these settings I see cross-domain security becoming a major issue and widespread usage a bit stifled (how are you going to use iframes on a mobile site?). Not to mention the layout and code issues involved with using iframes constantly.
Also, I find it amusing that Google wants to "bring the social" to any web page. "Social" is one of the "in" buzzwords right now (along with "open"), but I think people are losing sight of the fact that not every web page needs to be "social." And what exactly do people mean by "social"? Some of the "social" features added to sites today are not that different from online forums of old, the main exception being that now these features tend to span sites, as with Friend Connect. But I wonder if we're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Nice overview, Marshall.
iframes make me want to party like it's 1999.
I'd rather see this implemented as a site plugins that tie into third party data. Otherwise, more and more of your page is really somebody else's page.
Doesn't the iframe approach make it similar to MyBlogLog?
From the screenshot I see, MyBlogLog could easily add this functionality in their widget, aside from the fact that they might have to ask blog/site owners to make their frame bigger.
great job Marshall..nice post. this area will be highly contested.. it's war for google, fbook, myspace..
this will keep up blogger busy for a while..
keep on top of it
Great analysis Marshall.
I listened to your questions and I think one related to the need for interaction between different friend groups was good one.
I know its all very foggy at this point but let's be optimistic :)
one nice change... we seem to be evolving into a culture which does NOT think that it is nice for companies to be selfish
this could be a sign of the emergence of an entirely new paradigm involving extremely basic changes in much of the underpinnings of "business as usual"
redefining such things as intellectual property rights, profit, social advantage will lead to a more humane model of success, it is coming, the only question is when
It would've been much nicer if there's a RESTful api, in addition to an iframe -- that said, data returned from an iframe is presumably parsable, though not as convenient..
Another issue with Google's iframe approach: JavaScript must be enabled for any of this to work. No JavaScript? No Friend Connect.
Don't get me wrong, JavaScript is a great technology which has its place... but making every socially enabled (I hope that term doesn't catch on) web page so heavily dependent on JavaScript is not a good approach in my book.
Besides, there's not even any fallback in this case - with JavaScript disabled, you only see blank div's that didn't get replaced with iframe's. No possibility of graceful degradation.
Good post and very good comments
Apart from the technical issues of iframes, Google approach seems quite good to help small and medium websites.
For the user this is good because you would not need to register to each of the forums, websites or blogs you visit. This is the closest we can get to a "single sing-on" for web applications.
While MySpace and Facebook provide APIs aiming at enriching their existing profiles, Google is providing easy tools for small and medium websites to benefit from Social Networks and drive more traffic to them. Many small & medium websites use Google AdSense to manage their advertisement. Therefore the more traffic these tools drive, the more ads that Google will place in these sites. It is a win-win. Google wins, the small website win too, and the user hopefully wins too by dealing with less userIds and passwords.
Good overview, Marshall.
The question for website owners and publishers will always be what's most important and crucial for them to own and control. This comes down to their site's brand and relationship with their audience. The social web gives them the ability to create deep relationships that plays out of their members' profile and activity = the social graph core.
Publishers will continue to want their own social engine that provides them ownership, growth via social technology and the ability to 'plug in' to the broader social world. What Google and others are doing by adding their flavor of social functionality is a great value add to this--who wouldn't want to tap into millions to grow their website. But nothing can substitute ultimate ownership of their own users for site owners/publishers.
Adoption of Google initiatives seem to have been lagging (like, who builds Open Social apps?) but the more interesting part of all of these announcements is not what they will affect in the immediate or how even whether or not the implementation is great...but its more about what these initiatives say about the future of the web...a seemless social web isn't a pipe dream and while this current attempt may be lacking, it is merely the first attempt in a ongoing trek to social computing utopia :)
I remember back in the portal days, there were services that allowed you to add portal tools like calendar, chat etc to your own website, and if I remember correctly it didn't become a rave.
This kinda seems similar. Or am I missing something?
Note that I'm talking about the "concept" of doing what you could do on a big website for your niche audience on your own site.
Great stuff! Thanks for sharing, one fresh
idea and you can change the world, keep
up the great work.
I am quite sure the tech could be more interesting, but as the owner of a small UK-based business networking website this is a God-send. Imagine, now all new visitors to our site can sign in and invite other friends to come and join us in just a few clicks. It makes seeing the benefits of our sites so much easier to do for the 8.5 million Facebook users in the Uk for example.
Of course, the Devil is in the detail, but my interest in in making visitors to our site stick and bring folks with them, not really in whether iFrames is the most elegant way of doing it.
All said, I am still not sure how Google will make money from this. The assumption that they'd benefit from more traffic to Adsense sites is sound, but with a higher number of visits it would be tempting for many site owners to try and manage their own advertising with more focused local advertisers.
Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
This further commoditizes social networking. I think that's great for users.
hello seini wirte back
The rpivacy and data retention issues are paramount. Allowing users to select the privacy settings for each site they visit though should go some way in aiding privacy.
All this model needs now is for website owners/admins to be able to prescribe exactly what data they need. Various functionality (OpenSocial apps and unique-to-site functionality) is completely dependant upon that host site being granted access to that data.