Does Google Friend Connect have a point?

Yet – and I’m sorry if I seem ignorant, but I really do want to know – I still ask: What’s the point of it? Why would I want to be part of Google Friend connect on someone’s blog, or someone join it on my blog? Once we all do that, then what?

via Does Google Friend Connect have a point? — NevilleHobson.com.

I’m glad it’s not just me. When I set up the new blog, I installed both Google Connect and MyBloglog widgets, mostly to experiment with them and see hwo they work and what people use them for.

As far as I can tell, the primary purpose of these things is to give you a  way to show the universe just how popular you are. Which, if you’re into counting numbers and telling people how popular you are can be a really useful thing. Probably also useful if you’re trying to convince folks you’re an A-lister.

But honestly, that’s not me, so last night, as I was tweaking the sidebar and navigation based on watching the first couple of weeks of use of chuqui.com, I pulled both of them. I considered putting them on the About page for a while, but to be honest, I just couldn’t see any real advantage to me to having them.

Your mileage may well vary. But since I’m more interested in whether people find my writing interesting and not crowing about how many people “connect” to me, I don’t see a lot of use to either setup — for now. I am, however, going to see how Google enhances it down the road, because there’s still a need for a good, centralized common profile technology. This, however, isn’t it yet.

(MyBlogLog? well, it’s pretty much what it was when Yahoo! bought it. I’m not sure what plans, if any, Yahoo! has for it — and what I’m looking for these things to be seems to be something Yahoo! is trying to build into it’s account profiling and email platform. We’ll see. But the real story here, like Feedburner, is that being bought may pay off the founders and VCers, but it’s also almost a guarantee that a site will grind to a halt, because, of course, the first priority after being bought is revamping everything to fit the new corporate standards and migrate to their data center, technologies and servers. And that, the way the internet goes, is almost a guarantee to being irrelevant once you surface and try to figure out how to innovate the technology again…)

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