This week saw Facebook Connect open its doors to the broader world, on the same day that Google Friend Connect launched its public beta. This was the kind of day that headline writers dream of (“‘Friend-ly rivals’! Or maybe ‘With friends like these’! Or…”).
But it gave me that same sinking feeling that my parents probably had when they went VCR shopping for the first time and the salesperson said, “So – Beta or VHS?”
Now, some clever-pants developer has probably already created some kind of intricate way of melding the two… one that I hope can withstand the inevitable tweaks and upgrades each service will endure over time. With any luck, we may even soon be able to switch social networks and take our social graphs with us when we go. (And with that, I break a sworn oath never to use the term “social graph”.)
Just so long as it doesn’t leave our blogs and web apps like those parties where you have two circles of friends eying each other warily from across the buffet table. Can we all get along?
