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"For those of you who have been struggling to understand what Google's latest service, Friend Connect, really is, and how it relates to the competitors, I've found a simple answer: it's MyBlogLog on a global scale. \nMyBlogLog is a great little service (later acquired by Yahoo) with a simple idea: give a name and a face to your website's visitors. In a way, it takes your visitors and creates a social network out of them. Unfortunately, I think that Google's Friend Connect has just rendered them obsolete by doing the opposite, as it brought all social networks to your website's visitors. MyBlogLog has a relatively big community - 140,000 registered members is the latest number I've seen - but it's not as big as Facebook. Or MySpace. Or LinkedIn. And it's definitely not as big as all those sites put together. \nThe problem with MyBlogLog is that its community consists mostly of bloggers. Most bloggers, however, are also members of larger social networks, and now that Friend Connect enables them to tap into all those socnets, without any programming knowledge, MyBlogLog isn't really necessary anymore. The only thing it can really do is join the party.\nJohn McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, provides a good quote on Friend Connect: \n\"Instead of widgetizing apps and bolting them on to some corporation's proprietary social graph, why not widgetize the social graph and socially enable any Web site or Web page?\"\nThe implication of this is that widgetizing, outside of bigger, meta-networks like OpenSocial, might be coming to an end. What good is a widget which only taps into one service or network? Take a look at the current state of affairs:\n\nEach arrow represents a widget which moves data back and forth between a single website and a bigger network. It's a bit messy, because you need a lot of widgets to cover all bases. Now, with one big sweep of hand, Google introduces the following situation:\n\nSure, you can go around the big Friend Connect cloud, but chances are you're going to be left behind. Of course, Friend Connect is just one implementation of a bigger framework; a sign of times to come, if you will. \nOpenSocial marks the end of the fragmentation era. Friend Connect is the first big application of OpenSocial, immediately showing its strength: suddenly, it's pointless to create a website widget that's dependent only on one service when Friend Connect lets you tap into all of them at once. As new frameworks that connect more fragmented networks emerge, we will see less and less isolated applications. The standards are still in the making, though. Facebook, MySpace and Google all know this, and they're all trying to grab a big chunk of the pie now while it's still hot. It will be interesting to see how the cookie crumbles in the end."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/05/12/friend-connect-and-the-end-of-the-fragmentation-era/>