Google Friend Connect

» see google.com/friendconnect as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the first time i saw google friend connect was on someone else's blog around 2009 or 2010, in the sidebar where a row of small profile photos would render after the visitor signed in with their google account. that was the entire promise of the product. you would visit a small personal site, the page would show that some other person you knew on google had also visited, and a little widget would let you leave a comment without making a new account on that site. it solved the problem of "the comments section requires a new login" for one short window before everyone moved to disqus or sign-in-with-facebook.

google announced friend connect on may 13, 2008 at the campfire one event. the pitch was that any site could embed a small javascript snippet and immediately get social features without running any backend at all. comments, ratings, member discovery, a friends-of-friends sidebar, a featured-content widget, even small chat rooms after the june 2009 clackpoint addition. all of that ran inside google infrastructure with openid, oauth, and opensocial as the authentication and data layer underneath. for a few months in 2008 and 2009 it looked like the consensus answer for how the open web would do social.

the product had real adoption in the early-blogger sphere. by 2011 google was citing around two hundred thousand active site integrations. other counts ran much higher when you included the long tail of personal blogs that had pasted the widget in once and forgotten about it. the trouble was that the active sites mostly were not generating sustained social engagement through the widget itself. people would sign in to leave one comment and not return. the cross-site profile that was supposed to follow you around the web mostly just collected a hash of comment threads on hobby blogs.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

2008 was the year of the open social graph push. opensocial had launched november 2007 as a google-led alternative to facebook's developer platform. myspace, hi5, orkut, linkedin, and several others signed on as opensocial host containers. friend connect was the consumer-facing piece of that strategy, the part where the social graph would extend past any one container and onto the open web. for a year and a half the framing held and the consortium looked like it might actually fragment facebook's hold on the social-login layer.

the early integrations matched that framing. plaxo, ning, multiply, and a long list of smaller publishers wired in the widget. some media sites used friend connect as their full comments backend. there were posts in the techcrunch and readwriteweb archives from 2009 evaluating it against disqus and intensedebate as serious alternatives. for that brief window it was reasonable to think the comments-and-social-sidebar problem on independent blogs had a winner.

~ the fall ~

by 2010 facebook connect had eaten most of the new integrations. the facebook login button became the default cross-site identity layer because facebook had the active social graph that people actually checked daily. friend connect kept shipping features but never got the same dynamic on the consumer side. when google plus launched in june 2011, google's internal product priorities shifted hard. anything that could be repointed at google plus was repointed. anything that could not was a candidate for sunset.

the november 22, 2011 announcement said friend connect would be removed from all non-blogger sites by march 1, 2012. publishers got about a hundred days notice. the suggested migration path was to use google plus pages and the new google plus social widgets, which provided fewer features than friend connect had offered and required a different opensocial-incompatible integration. most sites that had relied on friend connect for comments did not migrate to google plus widgets. they migrated to disqus or to native commenting or to nothing.

~ the legacy ~

blogger kept friend connect for another four years because the legacy "followers" widget on blogspot blogs depended on it. that widget was what showed the row of subscriber avatars in the sidebar of millions of small blogs. killing friend connect inside blogger would have broken every one of those sidebars at once. google left it running until january 11, 2016, then finally retired it and showed a static followers count where the live widget used to be. that was the actual end of the product.

what google friend connect represented was the last serious push to make the social graph portable rather than concentrated. opensocial as a standard kept limping along until 2014 before its consortium dissolved into the w3c. by then facebook login had won the cross-site identity question and the open-graph framing had lost. the small piece of friend connect that survives in 2026 is the openid and oauth plumbing underneath, which became the boring authentication standard that every "sign in with google" button still runs on top of. the widget itself, the sidebar of avatars on a friend's hobby blog, is one of the cleaner artifacts of the brief 2008 moment when the open social graph still seemed plausible.

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