I’ve been helping a couple of people sort out their customer-facing sites recent and the same question has popped up: Google Friend Connect or FaceBook Connect? When Myspace weighed in with MySpaceID and promised to interoperate with Google Friend Connect, the questions multiplied. So as Christmas approaches, let me lean back against this mahogany fireplace, place my sherry carefully upon it and and expound for a moment.

Most of the initial debates that I’ve seen on suggest that this is an immediate battle and that Google/Facebook  are going head-to-head with comparable systems. Not so, in my opinion. While they both broadly aim to make Web sites more social, the offerings are in many respects very, very different. That may change in the future, but here’s the summary of where we are now:

Google Friend Connect

A Quick and dirty addition of social widgets to a Web site. Doesn’t really integrate into the existing site. Currently lacks an API, but expect that to change one day.

Pros

* Good for Non-coders with smaller sites who just want to cut and paste a widget in.
* Good for creating broad, loose networks.
* Expect to see wide availability of wide selection of apps (gadgets) as existing OpenSocial authors tweak their offerings.
* Open-ish - based upon OAuth, OpenSocial and OpenID.
* Support from Myspace, but limited details on integration at the moment.


Cons

* No API, so very limited ability to integrate social information into the mainstream site.
* Log-in is not integrated into the main site at the moment. So expect dual log-ins if your site already has user accounts.
* Not all OpenSocial apps work unmodified.

Facebook Connect

A more powerful system that allows integrated log-on and integration into an existing site thanks to its API. Implementation is more complex than Google Friend Connect.

Pros
* Proper single-sign-in tying site and social aspects together.
* Activity on your site can show up in users’ Facebook feeds - a nice viral way to promote the site.
* A full API giving site designers flexibility.
* Facebook users have to use their real names on your site. (Added veracity)

Cons
* More complex to implement.
* Tightly tied to the fortunes of Facebook.
* Facebook users have to use their real names on your site. (They might not want to)

The main advantages of Google Friend Connect is that a quick cut’n paste of some code is all that’s needed to integrate an open OpenSocial application (Google calls them gadgets) into your site. At the moment only a subset of OpenSocial applications worth in the Friend Connect environment Users can interact with these widgets using their existing Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID credentials.

The relative simplicity of using the Google offering  is already garnering benefits for  the company. Twitter’s recent announcement of support for Google Friend Connect (A user can log in to a GFC-enabled site using their Twitter credentials) was initially this was seen as rejection of Facebook. But “not so” says Twitter in its blog. It’s just that integration with Facebook Connect and MySpaceID are still works in progress that “will require some development effort on our part.”

In the future expect to see Google make its offering more powerful (I would expect an API) and Facebook to help make its more simple. Already it has  added a directory of plug-ins that allow popular blog and Wiki packages to work with Connect.

And what of MySpaceID? To be honest it still appears something of a closed book to me since it really hasn’t launched properly yet. It is holding out the  promise of synchronization of social activity back to a user’s Myspace page, but isn’t there yet. It's not even absolutely clear how the promised interaction between MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect will work in practice. I’d hold fire until more details emerge.

I'll be revisiting this topic in the future to look at exactly how much knowledge you lose about your userbase by implementing something like Facebook Connect.

In the meantime - have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.