One of last week’s biggest news was the agreement between Facebook and Yahoo to implement Facebook Connect across Yahoo properties – Mail, Flickr, News, Sports, Finance etc. There’s a good analysis of the deal at GigaOM. In addition to all of those usual suspects, I would be specifically interested in Yahoo! Music, and the potential for music sharing and buying, not to mention concerts. I think there’s more scope than the current app. A new breed of connections based on music likes and dislikes? 
Meanwhile, this means that Facebook now will get even more data on user consumption patterns, and will be able to serve even more ‘relevant’ ads. Like I’ve written before, Facebook’s trump card is the user filter that’s built into its search mechanism.
Something that Google does not have…yet. As of now, Google is trying to catch up with different approaches. Google recently launched Real Time search, (from Twitter, MySpace and even Facebook public profiles – a good post here) and coming soon is Social Search, something I haven’t tested out. But what Google also did, on the same day, is to do a Twitter integration for Friend Connect – comments, discussions on sites which have Friend Connect implemented, can now be taken back to Twitter, to induce more conversations. I’m now wondering where else integration will happen. Potentially, if the association is taken further- to other properties, Google could also apply this to News, Picasa, Calendar, Orkut, Maps (140 char reviews?, in addition to GeoChirp, and the super awesome Trendsmap )
The two deals have been discussed in many places as the Identity Wars, and the article linked to covers a lot of ground on how these associations are not really good for the web’s future – not just from the perspective of who controls the individual’s identity on the web, but also how difficult it is for smaller players to make inroads into these spaces.
In this era of personal branding, I can completely relate to the former as I struggle for portable content- from LinkedIn, Facebook, and even Twitter – tweets beyond the last 3200. I realised that, in future, it might not be an individual problem, but one that will be faced by different businesses too. Especially when I read about the CitySearch and Urbanspoon implementation of the new Twitter sign-up API, which will let businesses claim and manage their listings on the site and tweet from them. It would be interesting to see if Burrp or JustDial or any of the local listings/reviews services would implement it here. Yelp is now on Android, but that’s another track.
On the second point, there’s a service called Foursquare which is being hailed as the Twitter of 2010. When I read about the Citysearch-Twitter implementation, I asked on twitter whether this would affect Foursquare. Mahendra Palsule, who is the editor of Techmeme was of the opinion that the focus areas were different. And yet, while he does seem right, when I read the ‘Identity Wars’ post (linked earlier) and this Foursquare vs Facebook post from earlier, I wondered.
until next time, global wars and local battles
