Google, The Third Company To Connect Data Portability This Week. Who’s Going To Be Connect Four?

“Social is in the air.”
-David Glazer, Director of Engineering, Google

Facebook and MySpace announced this past week that they are making profile data portable if a user chooses to.  MySpace is calling this feature Data Portability and Facebook is calling it Facebook Connect.   And now Google is launching the same feature, but calling it Friend Connect.  About two dozen sites will have access to Google Connect initially, but expansion will happen in the coming weeks.

“You’ll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. And quite simply, you’ll be able to do things together,” wrote Mussie Shore, Product Manager of Google on The Official Google Blog.

On May 28 and 29, Google is holding a two-day seminar to discuss the OpenSocial initiative.  The event information is located at: http://code.google.com/events/io/.

Between Facebook, MySpace, and Google opening up this week, any guesses on who will be the fourth?  Microsoft?  Yahoo!?  Second Life?  My bet is on Yahoo!

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