Rex Is Excited

Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.

We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).

Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.

Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may - MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.

More details as they come in.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Some businesses (particularly in UK) have blocked access to Facebook during office hours as IT managers feel that surfing social networking sites at work could make employees less productive.

If you also happen to work in such a company where the office firewall has restricted access to Facebook, there’s a workaround - your email.

A new service called MoDazzle makes it possible to use Facebook (and LinkedIn) through email commands.

For instance, you can send an email to fbreadwall@modazzle.com with the subject SELF to read messages posted on your Facebook wall - alter the subject like JOHN to read John’s Facebook wall.

You can do most Facebook actions via email including poke, status updates, writing on a friend’s wall, read messages lying unread in your Facebook Inbox and so on.

Modazzle.com - also supports LinkedIn and Google Maps.

The service could also pick up in schools and countries like Syria and UAE that have banned Facebook on religious grounds.

Access Facebook Via Email - Digital Inspiration

I just read Mark Zuckerberg’s post where he’s basically apologizing for mistakes made in the launch of Beacon. I just want to share my personal experience with Beacon.

Yesterday, I was looking for a coffee shop to go study for my Business Strategy course. I did a quick search for “coffee” in “Santa Cruz, CA” at Yelp.com and was presented with a list of nearby cafés ranked by users. I went to the (relatively) new Bad Ass Coffee downtown, and had an amazing Double Cappuccino (with Half & Half). Looking back at Yelp, I saw mediocre ratings of the Bad Ass coffee, so I registered at Yelp and wrote my own review.

Later, I went to Facebook for something completely unrelated. Here’s what I saw:

Amazing! Impressive! I really like it! What happened? When did Facebook and Yelp talk? I don’t get it! But I like it!

Now, I’m sure Beacon has created all sorts of problems for people, but so far, for me, it’s been nothing short of awesome.

We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.

from: Zuckerberg: Thoughts on Beacon | The Facebook Blog

FriendCSV lets you export all your friends' vital data -- user ID, name, sex, birthday, about information, current location, hometown, profile URL, portrait URL, high school, education, work experience, and affiliations -- to an Excel file for mass manipulation. Facebook forces you to type in their email addresses yourself, but whatever. FriendCSV is a marketer, promoter or analyst's dream: Take all the info people are typing and clicking into Facebook's irrational interface, and load it into the world's favorite data analysis and manipulation tool. Oh, and when Google launches its Facebook killer, no doubt you'll be able to upload the file into it, saving me the aggravation of reconfirming for the fourth time that yes, John Markoff is my friend. (Image by TechCrunch)