News - Google Friend Connect to bring social networks to your site

Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080512-google-friend-connect-to-bring-social-networks-to-your-site.html
The barriers around social networking sites are finally crumbling as all the major players bring out their demolition crews. Both MySpace and Facebook have announced new data portability initiatives that will let users exchange data, make friends, and interact with third-party social networks. Now, Google has donned its own hard hat in the form of Google Friend Connect, promising to bring social networks and their features to the rest of the Internet.
Previewed by Google in a press release, Google Friend Connect will provide secure authorization APIs for any website owner to embed applications and features of any social networking site that hops on board. The advantage, however, is that these features will be provided as snippets of code that website owners simply place where they want on their sites. This removes the expensive overhead of programming these features and brings social networking integration to the "long tail" of the rest of the web.
Google illustrates the potential of this new platform with the website of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson, who used Google Friend Connect to embed music features from iLike into her site. Once Google Friend Connect goes live tonight (for a hand-picked group of whitelisted sites), Michaelson's visitors will be able to see comments from their social networking friends, who's going to one of Michaelson's concerts, add her music to their profiles, and more without having to visit iLike's site.
"We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us," said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. Indeed, the next evolution of social networking has been marked as the liberation of data onto the rest of the web. Facebook Connect, for example, will allow users to see which of their Facebook friends are on digg and what they're digging, and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative will let users plug their profile data into Twitter with links to their MySpace page and even favorite blogs.
As Google has so far failed to make any significant inroads with a social networking site of its own, Google Friend Connect mirrors Google's similar efforts like OpenSocial to position itself as a platform provider with tools that power social networks. While Facebook and MySpace's efforts focus more on plugging into established social networks, Google Friend Connect has the rest of the Internet in its crosshairs with simple tools that any owner can embed in their site. That said, Google Friend Connect is not without its drawbacks.
First, Google Friend Connect is sandboxed in an iframe when embedded in a site, according to ReadWriteWeb. At least for now, it sounds like the features provided through Google Friend Connect are essentially just a doorway to a customized portal for whatever social network is being embedded. While there are obvious and significant privacy implications with this idea, this also means that site owners won’t be able to plug directly into the data transferred from social networks either. From the limited details we have on Google Friend Connect right now, it doesn’t sound like this will allow site owners to tie, for example, Facebook identities to the user profiles, comments, and history that their visitors may have already built up on their site.
Google has a bit of work to do on Google Friend Connect, though, as it will only be a wait-list-based preview release once the switch is flipped later today. As it stands, Google Friend Connect sounds like a compelling way to allow social networking data and features to travel beyond the confines of a single website.