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Google Friend Connect: A Distributed Ning
via Sexy Widget by lawrence on May 11, 2008
Does anybody else feel like we are entering the golden age of cross domain web features? To me it feels like things are blowing up RIGHT NOW.
Cross domain blog commenting system Disqus (review) is reportedly on more than 10,000 blogs including some pretty big ones.
PollDaddy (review) continues to grow like gangbusters in distributed polling, and now has some competition in Quibblo.
And my own company, RateItAll (strategy), is trying to turn consumer reviews on its head by allowing folks to participate in the conversation from any domain.
Which brings me to Ning and Google Friend Connect. As slick as Ning’s service is, there is something that doesn’t sit quite right with me – mainly, that it is a straight up, unabashed, if you build it they will come, 1999 style, destination site. It’s Blogger with more social features, a nicer interface, and personalized subdomains.
The implication of this approach is that it requires a fresh start. You build your Ning social network from scratch, scrapping anything else you may have had online before. It lacks…. Incrementalism. Yes, it embraces the long tail by allowing anybody to create a social network for anything, but it demands a new long tail. It ignores all of those sites and communities and groups that are already engaged online.
I’m not saying it’s not going to work – Facebook has done OK as a destination site, as has LinkedIn. Alls I’m saying is that it’s a brute force play, and is outside of the fabric of cool cross domain stuff that to me, characterizes what’s special about the current era of the web.
Which brings me to Google Friend Connect.
Just like Ning, Google is also going after long tail web communities. But instead of demanding that folks pick up and move to longtail.ning.com, Google is attempting to provide the tools that let folks incrementally add social features to their existing communities.
I see three distinct strategies emerging in the Social Web, exemplified by the directions taken by Facebook, Ning, and Google:
Facebook – the mega destination site that will meet all of your needs – school, social, business.
Ning – the mega destination site that is chopped into millions of micro communities created, managed, and administered by volunteers.
Google – the provider of the tools that can be dropped into any site, incrementally enriching existing communities.
And between and among these three monsters, there's hundreds (thousands?) of scrappy startups trying to solve just one problem on the social media landscape, and using some variation of the three strategies above.
Widget ideology aside, I don’t know what’s going to win. As of today, destination sites monetize far better than edge plays. But if anybody can subsidize the edge until business models catch up, it’s Google.
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