The end of social networking sites

Google Friend, launched on Monday evening, brings to a close the era of social networking sites, and makes “social” a standard part of using the Web.

This trend has been clear for a while: the OpenSocial initiative has effectively allowed you to share your networks of contacts across them. I doubt this was first prize for sites like Facebook and Linked–In, which initially rose to prominence as ways to link to, and manage, your network of friends or colleagues. But as the number of social networking sites started to grow, it started to sink in that no–one was going to want to continually invite (or accept invitiations) with each new site. And so the greater good — which is something for which the Internet can still be justifiably lauded at times — prevailed.

Google Friend takes this to its logical conclusion. Thanks to some nifty engineering, site owners can basically drag–and–drop social networking functionality onto their pages. Using OpenSocial and OpenID (which creates a single sign–on across many of the most important sites out there), visitors to my site can now login and link–in their existing friends from any social networking site using OpenSocial.

For social networking sites this means one of their key value–adds, namely the ability to search for, link and interact with people I know, has been commoditised. Google Friend provides an underlying infratructure that makes any site a social networking site, and therefore kills the very idea.

It does, of course, give birth to a new idea, one that will no doubt prove even more important. And that is the notion that using the Web itself is a social experience. It adds a layer to the online experience: search, consume content, interact with sites and draw those experiences into the social domain.

Looking back, it’s obvious that this is no sudden change, but the result of a gradual shift from Web 2.0 applications to the Web 2.0. Services like Digg, De.li.cio.us, Stumbleupon and — at home — Muti, have broken through the isolated experience of surfing the web and exposed my web surfing to others, and theirs to mine. Social Networking sites have worked the other way around: linking me to people, and then building shared experiences on top of that network. This makes clear what the endgame of Facebook, say, is in launching Facebook Apps: to create a seamless, integrated, shared set of “program files” which deepen my connection with others. So, as it turns out, they don’t care about owning the network of friends, but rather what you do with that network.

Google Friend sits neatly between the two forerunner types of systems. It can be included on any site like Digg or Muti, so it can “come with me” while I’m surfing; and my “program files” is the entire web; but it manages my network of friends, and connections between all of us, just as Facebook or Linked–In do.

Facebook’s current power lies in the fact that, with one login, you get access to a huge variety of social experiences to which you can easily ask your network to participate. If Google Friend works, that will no longer be a benefit since any Web application will be able to do exactly the same thing. Your “Facebook Login” will now happen as you launch your browser. From there on, the Web will be your social playground.

It’s always easy to admire new Google applications, and some caution is needed. For starters, the Google API for Google Friend needs to be understood to see what kind of functionality it provides developers. And Facebook’s giant 70 million–plus user base, a lot of whom are very loyal, are not going to be easily wrested from them.

But the significance of this change is pretty enormous.