Gigya Socialize has been said to be in direct competition with Google's Friend Connect. That's true, but it also goes up against MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect. Before this round of improvements to the service, it was fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
Now Gigya Socialize can come out swinging and let us know how it will stand up to the competition. It now calls to the API of both MySpace and Facebook. This means that not only can you add social sharing and social networking to your own Web site with the widget, you can integrate your friends lists from the two heavy hitters of the social networking sphere, MySpace and Facebook.
From Gigya regarding the new feature: "Users of sites that incorporate Gigya Socialize will be able to easily enjoy the social features of those sites in conjunction with their MySpace and Facebook friends, by explicitly approving the websites for third party access to their MySpace and Facebook friend lists."
I like the idea of Gigya Socialize as a way to include your social networks in your site as a full experience. As with anything that involves a component where content is shared, I'm leery of ways it could be abused. In reading the Gigya Socialize EULA I found that while they do not specifically address the concerns of data ownership once data is socially shared by your network, they also don't stake a claim on it, which is encouraging.
Gigya Socialize offers a few main components: Newsfeed, Invitations, Notifications and a Friend Selector. They also offer a generic Friend Graph API module that more advanced user can customize somewhat more to their needs. The most useful aspect aside from friend integration from multiple networks is the content sharing and being able to track friends.