Over The Counter Culture

Having originally assumed that the reason Facebook, Hi5 and LinkedIn (FHL), amongst others, were involved in the Google Friend Connect (GFC) service, I initially wanted to write this post to argue that this was the biggest strategic mistake of their lives. Turns out, Google is involving them whether they like it or not - using their APIs to let you pull in your friend data to your Google Friend Connect profile from your other social networks.

In light of this, the point I’ll argue is therefore that not slamming the door on GFC’s scraping of their data would be a fatal mistake for FHL. Needless to say, deprived of their data, GFC loses all its value to users - so this is a zero-sum game.

I argued yesterday that all FHL could possibly gain from this is more information about you as you browse around the web and use social features on various websites. That’s an interesting datapoint (which they may not even have access to because they’re unwilling participants in this scheme), but long term, being part of GFC means their sites will be abandoned as Google rolls out the biggest social network mankind has ever seen, building on the sum of FHL’s networks, and more besides.

To see where I’m coming from, you have to understand the next strategic plays that I see Google potentially making with its GFC service. Indulge me in the following thought exercise:

Boom, there goes the neighbourhood, Facebook! Sorry, FriendFeed! Bye, LinkedIn, nice knowing you! Hi5, let’s face it, it’s about damn time you were abandoned. Google just built a meta-socnet. Don’t let your employees fight to be the one that gets to turn off the lights at your spanking new offices and costly datacentres.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.