Cracking open the gates to social networks’ walled gardens

Written by Noah Flower on Monday, December 15th, 2008
Filed under Network technology, News

With the release of MySpaceID, it’s looking like the social network is starting to break out of the “walled garden”–a development that could benefit the social sector. Using MySpaceID, any website can now outsource its login function MySpace, saving time and gaining access to information about that person’s friend connections to other users. This is hot on the heels of similar announcements by Google (which just made its Friend Connect service widely available and is now integrated with Twitter) and Facebook (which launched its Facebook Connect just hours after Google). As TechCrunch says, we’re now seeing a feature war over which social network can provide other websites with the easiest way to let users log in with a social network profile.

This is a good competition for the social networks–and good for us. Login management might sound like boring tech-speak, but if this change continues then we could see social networking features woven into nearly every website. That could add a surge of innovation to the “social web.” Imagine what might happen if those apps could be written anywhere on the Web, full integrated into larger websites, with the Facebook social networking features serving as the underlying infrastructure. In addition to pushing the use of social networking further, these features would be particularly useful to nonprofits, since it would give them handy tools for building social networking into their own sites without having to worry about forming their own communities. There are plenty of sites today that have their own social networks, but without the critical mass of a MySpace or a Facebook it’s often hard for them to get users to spend much time there. The infrastructure-level of integration hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s the express intention of Google’s Friend Connect, and you can bet that Facebook and MySpace aren’t about to be left out.