On the same day that Facebook officially unveiled Facebook Connect, Google followed up with the official launch of a similar tool with a similar name, Friend Connect.
Google, Ars Technica
says, is taking "a more distributed approach" to its standards-based portable registration platform. Google's take on simplifying the social Web allows Web site owners to embed tools like review
forms, comments, or photo-sharing widgets that pull data from participating social networks. Friend Connect uses standards like OpenID that allows users to simply log-in to participate in the
distributed social networking platform.
Ars weighs in on the pros and cons to Google's approach. On the bad side, Web site owners have "limited-to-no ability" to use the data from other
sites that users choose to interact with or share on their site. For example, a Web site owner could embed a tool that enables logged-in users to share a link to the site with Gmail contacts, but
these users won't be able to populate their profile on the site with their Twitter or MySpace info. Unlike Facebook Connect, Friend Connect also lacks a centralized are for controlling one's privacy
information, which makes it difficult for users to choose which sites have access to which snippets of their personal data.
Read the whole story at Ars Technica »