Home. Google Confirms Friend Connect. As we reported on Friday, Google will be launching its own data portability effort called Friend Connect.
It will be announcing more details about the preview later tonight, but in a press release this morning it confirms: Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see following this evening’s Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.
Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point? As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips.
In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns—as the slide above by Nova Spivack implies. Spivack is the CEO and founder of semantic Web startup Radar Networks and is pushing his view that semantic search will help solve these problems. But anyone frustrated by the sense that it takes longer to find something on Google today than it did even a year ago knows there is some truth to his argument.