Monday, May 12, 2008

Google's Social Strategy: Simply Open

The always insightful Dan Farber of News.com has a great first take on Google's just-announced Friend Connect platform for easily embedding social networking features into a website.

Google wants to make adding social features to a website a cut and paste affair, which, along with being associated with the Google brand, is the fastest way to online ubiquity. MySpace and Facebook's social strategies serve them well within their respective environments, but Google's participation in Open Social is the best long term strategy.

While not requiring coding is great, we'll have to see how powerful (aka customizable) Friend Connect is. Google will allow connects to other social services, especially those who have embraced OpenID and Open Social. Google appears to be in it to win it by being as open as possible, and that could reverse the tide towards the API-driven approach for displaying on Facebook and MySpace.

While MySpace and Facebook will do well as their own epicenters of social activity, the distributed approach of adding social features is the future for most publishers, and teaming up with Open Social/Google is a good strategy.

By John Gartner at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

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