Today, Google announced the upcoming release of Friend Connect, their service that allows you to use your existing Google Account to comment on websites and blogs that use the service. Some people have seen this as a move to make personal data more portable, but it seems likely it’s an answer to MyBlogLog which was bought last year by Yahoo. MyBlogLog provides the widgets that you see in the sidebar on this site.
If you check out the sample website they displayed as an example of Friend Connect in action below, you can see that one of the primary portions is a sidebar widget that shows who has visited the site recently. It looks like they also allow you to write reviews and rate the sites, and bloggers or site owners can post a widget with the most recent reviews.
Though I’m having a hard time understanding how this is innovative, I’m still considering making the switch. Google has one major leg up on MyBlogLog in that Google is much more likely to enable displaying your Google profile across the web as opposed to Yahoo’s MyBlogLog, which you have to sign up for specifically.
This strategy of automatically opting you into features has actually worked fairly well for Google when they implemented GChat in Gmail and sharing in Google Reader. I might argue that it’s playing fast and loose with privacy and might differ from my standpoint on who I would call a friend, but it actually does get me using new features to share with my friends.
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