SOA.WRK.

Social Service Providers: MySpace vs Facebook vs Google

MySpace fired the first shot last Thursday (5/8/08) with the "Data Availability" announcement. It plans to share with other sites its user social data, e.g., blogs, photos, TV, and friend lists. Major partners that will participate in the initial phase of this project include: Yahoo!, eBay, and Twitter.

Facebook responded the very next day (5/9/08) with an announcement of "Facebook Connect", a new feature allowing its users to connect their Facebook identity to partner sites to share social data like facebook friend lists. In the announcement, Digg was shown as a partner site that can be connected from Facebook.

Google followed up on Monday (5/12/08) with a "Friend Connect" announcement. This is a service that helps website owners to embed into their pages packaged social network functions like user registration, invitations, gallery, and reviews provided by larger social network sites as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

There is not much details provided by MySapce and Facebook. Google's Friend Connect site is up with several live demo sites running. Google also provided a video showing how to add social widgets to a site.

Friend Connect is a very interesting application of OpenSocial with federated authentication services. It basically turns a social network site into a social service provider. So, instead of creating/managing your own socical network using a provider like Ning, you can just outsource this service to Google!

Google has a jump on others, but I think MySpace, Facebook, and others potential social service providers will have similar things up and running soon.

Posted at 10:55PM May 12, 2008 by tientienli in Personal  |