The “Break it Down” Blog

Laurence Hartje sends in some freaking cool news: Google has launched it’s new Friend Connect (Link will go live tonight) social networking service for everyone. This isn’t another Okurt, but rather social networking infrastructure that can seamlessly be integrated into any and all websites, allowing users all visiting the same sites to gab about them and also learn about other sites in their realm of interest.

This takes the idea of a “walled garden” that MySpace and Facebook provide and out-sources the social networking aspects to Google, allowing you to take that functionality and plug it into any site you run.

For example, if Friend Connect was integrated on this site, you would see other users reading these stories and possibly share with them that this is the best goddamn site you have ever read; to which they would simply reply “no doubt, I stopped having sex because I’m always on BIDB reading articles”.

Obviously this bolsters Google’s ad network and ability to drop advertisements into more eyeball-laps.

No one is sure yet what the response from Facebook and MySpace will be to this, effectively taking high-end tools and giving them to the little guy (similar to what happened in the IDE market when companies like Genuitec stepped in at $30 cutting the knees out from under companies like IBM), but if I had to guess, it will be the same style response every big company gives: lots of marketing and an attempt to function at exactly the same level… instead of innovating in that arena first themselves.

This seems to be a theme of Google’s, forcing large companies to open up their networks for mass service and allowing people to compete at the service level instead of at the infrastructure level. They did it with Sprint and Verizon with the efforts behind the Open Handset Alliance and Android-enabled devices and now they are turning to revamp how social networks function.