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In May, Google announced a new initiative called Friend Connect that enables site owners to add social media to their websites, and allows internet users to connect their social accounts more seamlessly. But while Facebook was initally part of the effort, later they banned Google’s Friend Connect from their site, citing issues with privacy and the redistribution of user data.

Instead of waiting for Google to comply, Facebook has announced their own initiative: Facebook Connect. It’s designed to do basically be a FriendFeed - to aggregate information from users’ various profiles on numerous social sites in order to view it all in one place. Here’s the details of what to expect:

• Trusted Authentication - easily authenticate into partner sites using your Facebook account
• Real Identity - leverage your real identity across the Web in a trusted environment
• Friend Linking - take your friends with them wherever they go, enabling trusted social context anywhere on the Web
• Dynamic Privacy - assurance that the same privacy settings users have set up on Facebook will follow them wherever they decide to login throughout the Web
• Social Distribution - share actions on partner sites with your friends back on Facebook through feeds

Straight out of the gate, the following sites will utilize Facebook Connect:

Digg
Citysearch
Twitter
Seesmic (online video conversation tool)
Six Apart (blog publishing platform)
Hulu
CBS.com
CNET
CollegeHumor
Disney-ABC
Evite
Flock (social media browser developed on Firefox)
Kongregate
Loopt (new social network for iPhone)
Plaxo
Radar
Red Bull
Socialthing! (think FriendFeed)
StumbleUpon
The Insider
Uber
Vimeo
Xobni

What do you think of Facebook Connect? Let us know in the comments!

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Plaxo has signed an agreement to be aquired by cable giant Comcast, accoring to a post on the Plaxo blog. The two companies had previously been working together in partnerships, but have now decided that a permanent merger would maximize their efforts.

Those efforts include a unified approach to mashing up tv and social media. For example, one of the goals includes photo sharing across a variety of mediums including mobile, tv and computer.

Plaxo is known for its online address books that have been instrumental for popular social networking sites. The company is dedicated to open source and privacy efforts as well.

Many site owners dream about adding deep social features allowing users to interact with their friends in external communities. However the cost and know-how required to script against various sites’ APIs have traditionally been prohibitive for all but the largest publishers. Google’s Friend Connect bridges the programming gap by offering standardized tools to facilitate "richer social experiences" to mid and small size publishers. But what are the benefits to the average site owner? Why does this matter?

Background First
The Friend Connect “preview release” announcement today may foreshadow, in palpable terms, the ultimate street level impact of OpenSocial platform-thinking. Though not fully aimed at data portability objectives," webmasters will download cross-site "widgets" using a wizard starting sometime later today. The "social gadget" engine will generate turnkey code which includes "built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community."

According to the press release any site which deploys Google Friend Connect widgets will be able to "see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more."

Site Owner Benefits
These new tools will engage visitors and drive traffic by offering opportunities to interact with friends who publish their activities to other social sites, a technique many of us practice to various degrees. However Friend Connect offers all of this functionality without hiring a team of programmers…just download the widget, hook it up and rock.

Visualize your users inviting their Facebook and other social community friends (contacts) to "join" them to participate in your site. Users can them "publish back" to other social communities they’re active in, making the promotion of your content truly exponential as it ripples amongst friends of friends, etc… While this type of viral propagation has long been in the vocabulary of social media publishers, in past years activity has been largely limited to closed-loop thinking. In other words, what happens in one site stays in the site absent specialized configurations and a lot of know-how.

Already cross pollination add-ons like the StumbleUpon Facebook Application mingle multiple social site experiences to where recommending a site on SU results in publishing the thumbs-up to your FB profile for all of your friends to see. There are many third party widgets which accomplish similar ends including WordPress Twitter Plugs which automates pulling tweets into your blog and creating new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

It takes a lot of research to put together custom suites of such tools. The excitement surrounding Friend Connect is in regards to standardization, expanding reach and lowered cost to make a wide array of previously unavailable social integration available to mid and small size publishers

If you’ve wanted to ride the social media marketing wave by adding social features to your website, but the economy has you worried about spending lots of money on apps, then get excited. Google is again coming to the rescue by offering a free service for you to get your social media game on.

After Google’s Campfire One event tonight, website owners will be able to utilize Friend Connect (http://www.google.com/friendconnect). Basically, it’s social applications for the coding-challenged. Visitors to sites using Friend Connect will be able to “see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.”

David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google had this to say: “Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social. Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

What do you think about Friend Connect? Plan to add it to your site? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

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