Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots

A few weeks ago I wrote about Google’s baby step into the social networking game, when it announced it was testing social features in its branded start-page, iGoogle. In an attempt to be a blogger rock star (hah!), I coined the term “scaled automation” to describe the web giant’s approach to this arena. In a nutshell, it combines Google’s penchant for automatically interpreting your social graph (“automation”) with its “long-tail” philosophy of breaking down barriers to the flow of information across the entire web (“scaled”).

To its credit, Facebook — the reigning champion of social networking — picked up on the “scaled” trend and announced Facebook Connect last week. This new feature will serve as a gateway to Facebook’s so-called “walled garden” of social graphs. Websites external to Facebook will be able to offer users the option of logging in using their Facebook credentials. Additionally, users can port some of their social graph data (friend connections, photos, etc.) to those external websites. From the Facebook Developers’ Blog:

Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites. [...] As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.

While Facebook will begin scaling across the web, however, it has not embraced the “automation” side of Google’s philosophy. Indeed, in response to Facebook Connect, Google revealed the rest of their social networking plans today with the announcement of the similarly-named Google Friend Connect. Google’s VP of Engineering describes his company’s vision of the social web, and you can instantly see how it differs from Facebook’s:

The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. [...] Now it is working to connect people to other people.

Google is basically launching the same initiative as Facebook, but the spirit behind the implementation is different. Google wants to connect you everywhere, just like Facebook; however, Google also wants to connect you to everyone.

As we’ve examined on this blog many times before, Google thinks it’s better than you at creating your social graph. Most of you use Gmail, and have seen your contact lists explode as a result of the built-in auto-saving feature (that you can’t turn off). After a few e-mails, you’ll eventually have the capability (note I didn’t say “option”) to chat with what Google considers to be your “friends.” In contrast, Facebook won’t add a single friend to your graph until you’ve told it to.

Which strategy will be more popular and succeed? Who will win, Google or Facebook? Or can they coexist? The answer, of course, lies with users like you and me. Will we want to be connected across the web to a wide array of people, some of whom are just “contacts” ? Or as we venture outside of the maximum security facility that is Facebook, will we prefer to keep our social circles tightly woven around those that we have “confirmed” as friends?

I’ve been saying for a while that the future of web 2.0 is social networking as a feature, not as an application. Social networking will become the thread that ties the web together. The question is how much control we’ll have over that thread, and how widely it will be dispersed. Interesting times ahead.

[Disclaimer: Though MySpace also launched a data portability initiative last week (including announced partnerships with big players such as eBay and Twitter), I think MySpace is kind of a big, ugly, irrelevant joke. Sure it has lots of members and gets a lot of traffic; call me biased, but it seems to me more like some kind of freaky conglomeration of the mainstream media, advertisers, Rupert Murdoch and 14-year-olds. But if you really want to, you can read more about "MySpace Data Portability" here.]

Google image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user search-engine-land. Facebook image courtesy of Facebook Developers Blog.