Facebook vs Google Connect


Everyone seems to want your identity these days, from crooks to corporates. I’m playing around with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect at the moment to see which one offers me most as someone running a piffling little website.

First up, a completely different topic: I have a problem with Facebook only allowing me to import the one blog. Is it too much to ask to be able to pull in two feeds, this one and my cycling blog?

Back to the subject, there’s a really helpful analysis of the Facebook Connect vs Google Friend Connect on Mashable which is where I started this morning with it. At the moment it seems to boil down to ease of implementation vs where the social audience is.

As a mediocre developer who gets a mild fear when I hear people talking code, google won the first round on grounds of fire-and-forget implementation. Let’s face it, if you are a hobbyist web site owner, do you want to sit through an 8-minute video on how to do a basic Facebook Connect login and then have to do the coding yourself; or just go click-click-bang to implement google friend connect?

That’s why there’s a small Wall widget on each page of the site from Google and not a Facebook one as yet. OK I’ve got the side issue that I’ve only recently started using Disqus for comments and I don’t see how either of them plugs in to that but Google won because I could do it and do it quickly.