Google Friend Connect

Last updated

Google Friend Connect
Google FC logo.png
Type of site
Social Networking Script
Available inMultilingual
Owner Google
URL www.google.com/friendconnect
CommercialFree
Registration OpenID
Current statusSuspended

Google Friend Connect was a free social networking site, active from 2008 to 2012. [1] Similar to Facebook Platform and MySpaceID, it allowed users to build a profile to share and update information through messaging, photographs and video content via third-party sites which acted as a host for profile sharing and social exchanges. [2]

Contents

Google Friend Connect used open standards such as OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial allowing usage with no registration, once authenticated they could use their existing profile and access a social graph when posting messages, the social graph feature allowed a user to post a message on a third-party site, but allowed viewing access only to other authorized "friends" contained within the user's chosen social graph.

Google Friend Connect was removed for all non-Blogger sites by March 1, 2012, [3] and for Blogger sites on January 11, 2016. [4]

API

The Google Friend Connect API allowed website owners to query the content of user profiles, and provide website content from Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk, Netlog, Twitter, and YouTube, along with ads tailored to the specific user via HTML/JavaScript "gadgets" into their pages

These "gadgets" included Social Bar, Comments, Ratings and Reviews, Featured Content, Interests' Poll, Recommendations, Events and Games. In June 2009, Google added a gadget called ClackPoint, which offered live text chat, conference calling and document sharing, including simultaneous editing by multiple users. [5] A Community Widget was also offered, allowing website owners to include content from partner sites, similarly to other widgets such as BlogCatalog and Facebook Fan Pages. [6]

Statistics

As of 2011, it was estimated that approximately 200,000 websites used Google Friend Connect, with 2889 of them in the top million visited sites on the Internet. However Google estimated that over 5 million sites used Google Friend Connect. [7] It was also claimed that 99% of sites were said to not be socially enabled prior to the introduction of Google Friend Connect. [8]

History

Google Friend Connect was first previewed at Google Campfire One on 13th May 2008 and launched within days of Facebook Platform. [9] In December 2008, Google Friend Connect went into beta. [10] Independent musician Ingrid Michaelson's official website was one of the first websites used as a prototype by Google to illustrate features from Google Friend Connect. [11]

On November 23, 2011, Google's Senior Vice President of Operations Urs Hölzle announced that Friend Connect would be retired for all non-Blogger sites by March 1, 2012, and encouraged the now defunct Google+'s pages and off-site Page badges as the preferred alternative. [3] On December 21, 2015, Google software engineer Michael Goddard announced that the service would be turned off on Blogger on January 11, 2016, stating that "we’ve seen that most people sign into Friend Connect with a Google Account." [4]

User data

Every user's data in Google Friend Connect consists of three things, a description of identity and 'my profile', the social graph, and content created by the user both published and not. [2]

Privacy

To access Google Friend Connect, sign in is by Google or other services that support OpenID such as Yahoo and ChromeOS's Instant Messenger which by extension means that Google collects information from those services. Google states that information provided to Google Friend Connectuser's activity, information about friends, Twitter account, and information collected by gadgets.

Publishing user activity to their activity streams in their social network is by default set to off. Site owners couldn't see user's sign-in information but the user's nickname, their image, the content they publish on the site, and the date they became a member. Site owners had the ability to moderate content on their site and remove users. Third-party sites received a user's Google account or OpenID username and the user's published information from that site, a third-party site could collect user information that is not related to the Google Friend Connect service.

A data breach was reported in November 2010, where an exploit allowed users to harvest email addresses for logged in users when a visitor used a website. [12]

Competition

Google and Facebook announced their plans for social networking sites within days of each other. Facebook blocked its users from using Google Friend Connect because of concerns with privacy as it believed that user information could be redistributed to others without the user's knowledge which Google responded by saying that "users are in control of their data at all times". [13] In 2009 Google Friend Connect altered its installation process no longer required the need for any file uploads within days of Facebook doing the same. [14]

Features

Users could translate selected content of different language into their own specified language. [15] Users didn't need multiple registrations as they could link their account on a social networking site to their account on a third party site. It was intended for personification to be achieved through gadgets like 'Interests' which allowed third-party sites to send out newsletters to those subscribed to the site and to customize newsletters based on user responses. Google Friend Connect had an 'AdSense' feature that let Google advertise based on site content and the user interests that are publicly shared by the user. [16]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orkut</span> Social networking website owned and operated by Google

Orkut was a social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service was designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website was named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

The social web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web. The social web encompasses how websites and software are designed and developed in order to support and foster social interaction. These online social interactions form the basis of much online activity including online shopping, education, gaming and social networking services. The social aspect of Web 2.0 communication has been to facilitate interaction between people with similar tastes. These tastes vary depending on who the target audience is, and what they are looking for. For individuals working in the public relation department, the job is consistently changing and the impact is coming from the social web. The influence held by the social network is large and ever changing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Talk</span> Instant messaging service

Google Talk was an instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication. The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenID</span> Open and decentralized authentication protocol standard

OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites using a third-party identity provider (IDP) service, eliminating the need for webmasters to provide their own ad hoc login systems, and allowing users to log in to multiple unrelated websites without having to have a separate identity and password for each. Users create accounts by selecting an OpenID identity provider, and then use those accounts to sign on to any website that accepts OpenID authentication. Several large organizations either issue or accept OpenIDs on their websites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">News aggregator</span> Client software that aggregates syndicated web content

In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader, or simply an aggregator is client software or a web application that aggregates digital content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items.

Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. It is an enhanced version of web search that combines traditional algorithms. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher. The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in LinkedIn people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc.

Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, Koo, and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.

iGoogle Personal web portals developed by Google

iGoogle was a customizable Ajax-based start page or personal web portal launched by Google in May 2005. It was discontinued on November 1, 2013, because the company believed the need for it had eroded over time.

The Internet is accessible to the majority of the population in Egypt, whether via smartphones, internet cafes, or home connections. Broadband Internet access via VDSL is widely available. Under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, Internet censorship and surveillance were severe, culminating in a total shutdown of the Internet in Egypt during the 2011 Revolution. Although Internet access was restored following Mubarak's order, government censorship and surveillance have increased since the 2013 coup d'état, leading the NGO Freedom House to downgrade Egypt's Internet freedom from "partly free" in 2011 to "not free" in 2015, which it has retained in subsequent reports including the most recent in 2021. The El-Sisi regime has ramped up online censorship in Egypt. The regime heavily censors online news websites, which has prompted the closure of many independent news outlets in Egypt.

Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services into a unified presentation. Examples of social network aggregators include Hootsuite or FriendFeed, which may pull together information into a single location or help a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into a single profile.

The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook.

FriendFeed was a real-time feed aggregator that consolidated updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and microblogging updates, as well as any type of RSS/Atom feed. It was created in 2007 by Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh. It was possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, with friends. Friendfeed was built on top of Tornado. The service was shut down at about 21:00 GMT on April 10, 2015, though the service blog announced it a month before.

Internet censorship in Vietnam prevents access to websites critical of the Vietnamese government, expatriate political parties, and international human rights organizations, among others or anything the Vietnamese government does not agree with. Online police reportedly monitor Internet cafes and cyber dissidents have been imprisoned. Vietnam regulates its citizens' Internet access using both legal and technical means. The government's efforts to regulate, monitor, and provide oversight regarding Internet use has been referred to as a "Bamboo Firewall". However, citizens can usually view, comment and express their opinions civilly on the internet, as long as it does not evoke anti-government movement, political coup and disrupt the social stability of the country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media marketing</span> Promotion of producs or services on social media

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers. Most social media platforms have built-in data analytics tools, enabling companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns. Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public. On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the management of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope and the establishment of a firm's desired social media "culture" and "tone."

Wadja solves the problem of conversation relevance by giving users a way to label social activity, and curate that activity into meaningful conversations. Wadja is based in Cyprus and had its BETA launch in August 2006. As of December 2009, Wadja had over 5,000,000 registered users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Wave</span> Software framework for real-time collaborative editing online

Google Wave, later known as Apache Wave, is a discontinued software framework for real-time collaborative online editing. Originally developed by Google and announced on May 28, 2009, it was renamed to Apache Wave when the project was adopted by the Apache Software Foundation as an incubator project in 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Path (social network)</span> Social network

Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allows users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family. Based in San Francisco, California, the company was founded by Shawn Fanning and former Facebook executive Dave Morin.

Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion regarding the database's ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration, and the legality, awareness, and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in advance of the technological age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google+</span> Defunct social network owned and operated by Google

Google+ was a social network that was owned and operated by Google until it ceased operations in 2019. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google products like Google Drive, Blogger and YouTube. The service, Google's fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years, although usage statistics varied, depending on how the service was defined. Three Google executives oversaw the service, which underwent substantial changes that led to a redesign in November 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Facebook Graph Search</span> Semantic search engine by Facebook

Facebook Graph Search was a semantic search engine that Facebook introduced in March 2013. It was designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links. The name refers to the social graph nature of Facebook, which maps the relationships among users. The Graph Search feature combined the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results. In a presentation headed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was announced that the Graph Search algorithm finds information from within a user's network of friends. Microsoft's Bing search engine provided additional results. In July it was made available to all users using the U.S. English version of Facebook. After being made less publicly visible starting December 2014, the original Graph Search was almost entirely deprecated in June 2019.

References

  1. Schonfeld, E. (2008) Google Confirms Friend Connect. Available: https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/12/google-confirms-friend-connect/ Archived 2017-06-14 at the Wayback Machine Last accessed: 20/04/2011
  2. 1 2 Ko, Moo Nam; Cheek, Gorrell P.; Shehab, Mohamed; Sandhu, Ravi (2010). "Social-Networks Connect Services". Computer. 43 (8): 37. doi:10.1109/MC.2010.239. S2CID   9668277.
  3. 1 2 Urs Hölzle (2011-11-22). "More spring cleaning out of season". Google. Archived from the original on 2018-08-01. Retrieved 2011-11-24.
  4. 1 2 Michael Goddard (2015-12-21). "An update on Google Friend Connect". Google. Archived from the original on 2016-02-17. Retrieved 2016-02-16.
  5. (2009) Introducing the ClackPoint gadget. Available: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-clackpoint-gadget.html Archived 2011-08-17 at the Wayback Machine . Last accessed: 19/04/2011.
  6. Flannery, C. and Karr, D. (2010) Corporate Blogging for Dummies. USA: Wiley Publishing
  7. (2011) Google Friend Connect Usage Statistics. Available: Archived 2017-08-24 at the Wayback Machine . Last accessed: 20/04/2011
  8. Shiels, M. (2008) Google helps the web go social. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7397470.stm. Last accessed: 21/04/2011.
  9. Campfire One: Google Friend Connect (pt. 1) , retrieved 2023-11-29
  10. "Friend Connect now available in beta to everyone | Google Search Central Blog". Google for Developers. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  11. "A friend connected web". Official Google Blog. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  12. Dsouza,K.(2009) Google Friend Connect Exploit Allows Users To Harvest Emails. Available: http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/google-friendconnect-exploit.html Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine . Last accessed: 20/04/2011
  13. Arrington, M. (2008) He Said, She Said In Google v Facebook. Available: https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/he-said-she-said-in-google-v-facebook/ Archived 2017-07-09 at the Wayback Machine . Last accessed: 19/04/2011
  14. Kincaid, J. (2009) Easy Does IT: Google Friend Connect One-Ups Facebook Connect's Install Wizard. Available: https://techcrunch.com/2009/10/02/easy-does-it-google-friend-connect-one-ups-facebook-connects-install-wizard/ Archived 2016-09-23 at the Wayback Machine . Last accessed: 18/04/2011
  15. "Friend Connect Goes International". Google Social Web Blog. 2009-07-14. Archived from the original on 2009-07-16. Retrieved 2009-07-14.
  16. (2009) Google Friend Connect, now more personalised. In Social Web Blog. Available: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/11/google-friend-connect-now-more.html Archived 2011-08-17 at the Wayback Machine . Last accessed: 19/04/2011