The company introduced a new community service which should enable publishers to sites add features to their social site, and users to participate using their existing profiles elsewhere.After MySpace and Facebook, it is the turn of Google lifted the veil on its draft portability of data: Friend Connect. It illustrates the challenge of the moment on Web 2.0.
The networks have all developed in parallel and closed circuit, so that the user who wishes to be present on several of these sites, must manage multiple identifiers, but also several profiles, several lists of friends and son of different activities . The concept of “Data Portability” in English must therefore allow the user to cross its various data and export to different sites.With MySpace and Facebook Avaibility Data Connect, the two leaders of social networks have launched the first initiatives, even if they are in their infancy. Moreover, the system works with a limited number of partners; MySpace, for example, has signed agreements with Yahoo, eBay, PhotoBucket and Twitter for data exchange.Google sees broader does not diposant major social network: Connect with friend, he intends to propose the publishers website graft their own network on their pages, with a system that would be interoperable with other community services already widespread .No technical knowledge necessary “We added features in the social infrastructure of the web, and it is not attached to a specific site,” says a CNET News.com David Glazer, director of engineering at Google. “Users can interact with any of their friends, whatever their destination on the web, and with any application.”Friend Connect is based on three technologies that Google hopes to see become widespread as standards: OpenSocial, the initiative which aims to enable the development of compatible applications on all social networks participants; Open ID, the system of unified management of ‘online identity and OAuth, a protocol for secure authentication of users.Specifically, Friend Connect addressed primarily to publishers site. In the example he has chosen to present its technology to the press, this is Annie, who created a site for lovers of Guacamole (see video below, in English); she registered to join the initiative Friend Connect. It can choose among several applications created by Google or third party developers to add features in its social web pages: allow visitors to register, noting articles and comment, add photos. The all without writing a single line of code, Friend Connect takes care of itself generate the code needed to be included in the pages. What about the management of private data from one network to another? Visitor to the site and Annie will show some news: when will rejoin the community of Guacamole, he will not have to create a new identity , But simply to choose the one he wants to use it is already a member, for example Facebook, Orkut, or if it has an identifying Google. His membership in this new community will then be reported to his network of friends, who in turn will automatically register on site.Pour now, Google has opened a waiting list to enable publishers to register to access Friend Connect, which is only stage of “preview release”. It should start by giving the green light to several dozen of them in the coming days, the gradual opening of the service will be in the coming months. The moteur de recherche priority wants to be careful in the selection of sites to ensure that they will respect the lives of utilisateurs.Car the system as it is currently described may fear the worst for the protection of personal data What will know specifically the publisher about the Internet as part of its network? How the data will they navigate a social network to another, how the user can he decide what he wants to keep private? And especially what data, among this huge stream, Google will store it and possibly use? At all these issues, the company does not give a specific answer: “We want to make sure we do things properly, especially when it comes to users’ data “merely indicates David Glazer.