Data Portability Google and Facebook Style: Which One Will Webmasters Choose?

Quite surprisingly Google and Facebook decided to announce general availability of their data portability programs – Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect – on the very same day. This means that both Google and Facebook users will now be able to use their identities with Google or Facebook on other sites that support one of the programs. These sites will allow their visitors to log in and use the already available information in their profiles as well as find friends already on the sites that they currently visit – and connect to them on these sites as well.

It is not surprising that we will now see a very interesting competition between the two internet giants fighting for webmasters attention and persuading them into using their data portability services. Facebook founder Marc Zukerberg has already encouraged the social network’s users to contact webmasters of their favorite websites and ask them to install the code required for Facebook Connect to work so that the visitors won’t have to register and build new profiles every time they want to use a new site. And Google has also been busy encouraging web publishers to try Google Friend Connect out on their sites by contacting bloggers via email and inviting them to use the service by Google.

There is no doubt that we will now see more and more websites eagerly adding functionality for both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect but the most intriguing question now will be what the webmasters will do now that the data portability programs are available from two large providers: will they choose to use Google’s one or will they think that the Facebook social graph information will be more valuable for them in the long run.

My opinion for now is that the majority of webmasters will be better off opting for Facebook Connect program – for the simple fact that it will help them in distribution of their content and in geting some extra visibility. The thing is that visitors using Facebook Connect to log in to a website will be able to allow such websites to send the information about their activity on the sites (comments, reviews, votes or whatever it may be) back to their Facebook profiles – and to news feeds of their friends as well. Obviously, it will mean that the website will have good chances of more people arriving from Facebook after watching their friends already using this or that service. And since there are not so many websites on the world wide web that are more popular than Facebook (or at least equally popular), owners of a multitude of sites will probably be more than happy to use a chance to reach the huge Facebook population with Facebook connect functionality.

At the same time there are a number of disadvantages in the Google Friend Connect that will be sure to play a crucial role in this new competition. For example, an important issue is that the volume of information for a user that Google can provide any site with will be rather limited as it only comes from Google profile and connections on the smaller social networks like Orkut and Plaxo (with both Facebook and MySpace deciding to opt out for the sake of competition). This basically means that Google Friend Connect functionality will not distribute the website activity to anything as large as Facebook user base is and the number of friends you will be able to connect to will also be limited to your friends on Orkut and Plaxo. And I think it is quite understandable that Facebook tends to be larger and you will have better chances of meeting your Facebook friend on some website than meeting your Orkut friend.

So while it is said that Google Friend Connect is way much easier to implement for a webmaster, I think the chances of reaching the large Facebook community are way more attractive than simply saving some time installing the code. And do you know any website owner who can resist getting some visibility (probably a lot) for free, at the same time actually doing something good and valuable for their users? Honestly, Google is a giant and it often has perfect chances of winning in any competitive struggle but this does not seem to be the case.