A social bar for your site
Labels: Google Friend Connect, new features — While it's easy to add social features to your site with Google Friend Connect, you may have been wondering where to put all of the great gadgets. You need your users to sign in, to interact with your site …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Google first previewed Friend Connect in May 2008, the pitch was that any website owner could bolt social features onto their pages without building a network from scratch — a bet extended months later when Friend Connect opened up to Twitter users. The problem Google is now solving is presentation: gadgets for sign-in, comments, and member activity needed somewhere coherent to live on a publisher's page.
First-order effects
- Site owners running Friend Connect get a single persistent strip to host sign-in and social gadgets, replacing ad-hoc placement of individual widgets across their pages.
- Google gains a consistent visual anchor for its social layer on third-party sites, making Friend Connect more visible to visitors rather than buried in sidebar gadgets.
Second-order effects
- A standardized embed surface lowers the setup burden further, tightening the competition with Facebook Connect over which identity layer small publishers adopt — a race that soon turned on ease of installation.
- Publishers get less reason to hand-build or buy standalone community widgets, pressuring the market for independent social plugins.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the contest shifts from who has the most social features to who controls the default login-and-identity rail embedded across the open web — leverage that accrues to whichever platform becomes invisible infrastructure.
- Small publishers increasingly trade page real estate and user relationships for turnkey social plumbing, deepening dependence on a few large platforms for functionality they once owned outright.
The trend: This is an early data point in the platform wars to become the default social identity layer of the non-social web, where distribution through embeddable widgets matters more than any single feature.