For those of you who have been struggling to understand what Google's latest service, Friend Connect, really is, and how it relates to the competitors, I've found a simple answer: it's MyBlogLog on a global scale.
The problem with MyBlogLog is that its community consists mostly of bloggers. Most bloggers, however, are also members of larger social networks, and now that Friend Connect enables them to tap into all those socnets, without any programming knowledge, MyBlogLog isn't really necessary anymore. The only thing it can really do is join the party.
John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, provides a good quote on Friend Connect:
"Instead of widgetizing apps and bolting them on to some corporation's proprietary social graph, why not widgetize the social graph and socially enable any Web site or Web page?"
The implication of this is that widgetizing, outside of bigger, meta-networks like OpenSocial, might be coming to an end. What good is a widget which only taps into one service or network? Take a look at the current state of affairs:
Each arrow represents a widget which moves data back and forth between a single website and a bigger network. It's a bit messy, because you need a lot of widgets to cover all bases. Now, with one big sweep of hand, Google introduces the following situation:
Sure, you can go around the big Friend Connect cloud, but chances are you're going to be left behind. Of course, Friend Connect is just one implementation of a bigger framework; a sign of times to come, if you will.