What with AOL joining Open Social and new service Gigya Socialize opening fire against Google Friend Connect, the battle between social network sites is only set to increase in intensity.Google Friend Connect just doesn't seem to be having any luck. First of all Facebook banned the application only three days after the launch and now Gigya Socialize has been launched in direct competition with the already-shaken service. What could this mean for Google's effort?
Gigya perhaps have good cause for the attack: its plans for the social network combination service were announced in February, with Gigya President Rooly Eliezerov positing that whoever possessed the collected information of such a service could become the next Google - but then Google Friend Connect appeared, putting Gigya Socialize into a tough spot. Assured that its product was different enough to make it superior, Gigya went ahead and launched Socialze - and it doesn't appear to have been blocked by Facebook. Yet. It'll be interesting to see how the service fares up against such established competitors; will it flag or come out victorious in the face of a challenge?
The rejection by Facebook of Google Friend Connect was a severe enough blow - Facebook is the leading social networking website at the moment. What's more, the reasons behind it seemed dubious: Facebook claimed that Google Friend Connect jeopardised the privacy of their users, but soon after news emerged that the Facebook Platform was going open source. The social networking darling's rejection of Google's friendly offering could result in a significant loss to Google Friend Connect's potential user growth, and the addition of Gigya's competition is probably not a welcome prospect.
In other social network news, AOL has also made a decision - or rather not - about its loyalties as it officially joined Google's big-name Open Social yesterday. An innocuous enough decision, but don't forget that AOL's recent social networking acquisition Bebo integrated with Facebook's platform last year. Being a part of both platforms allows AOL and Bebo to benefit from features inaccessible to users on competing services, and also allows it to 'wait and see' which platform will beat the lot. Given the push and pull of open source competitors at present, perhaps it's a wise move to just hang back and see what happens.
