"This means that when you join a friend connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website," explains Google Friend Connect Product Manager Mussie Shore.

"With Google Friend Connect, Twitter folks will be able to bump into and recognize each other out there on the web—and discover new people to follow on Twitter," says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone on the Twitter Blog.

To send a tweet at a site using Friend Connect:

1. Click the invite links in the members gadget
2. Click the Twitter icon on the share tab
3. The next time your followers sign in to Twitter they’ll see your tweet

"This integration with Twitter is an example of how we want to continue improving Friend Connect, extending the open social web and bringing social features to more places on the web," says Shore.

Friend Connect was originally launched in preview form back in May, but was just releasd publicly earlier this month. To learn more about it, watch the following video:

On the Facebook Developer’s blog post “Thoughts on Privacy” it says:

We’ve found that it [Google Friend Connect] redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

Now the post doesn’t come out and say their thoughts are not random musings, but an announcement that they are “suspending Google Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information” until they come into compliance. In other words, the application passes information from your Facebook profile to other sites without your knowledge.

As far as we know Google hasn’t responded but Facebook says, “We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.” In the post, Facebook said they didn’t know what they were agreeing to and that there was never a formal partnership.

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I saw Dave Morin, who runs Facebook’s developer platform, at Google’s event Monday night. You can see him at the end of the event where I shoved my cell phone in his face and tried to get him to comment. He refused.

After the camera is off he said it was “interesting” that Google had used Facebook as one of the examples during its launch of Friend Connect.

I guess it was a lot more than “interesting.”

They blocked Google because they didn’t want Google to populate its friend network with data collected from Facebook.

Oh, I know, that’s not the real reason they told TechCrunch and others. Here’s the official statement from Facebook.

Facebook is being consistent here. Dave Morin told me a few months ago all about Facebook’s concerns. Such as, what happens if you change your email address, will it change everywhere that your email address got copied to?

Clearly with Google’s Friend Connect the answer is “no.” Why? Because it was a one-time action and there was no live connection back to Facebook and Google’s Friend Connect’s data would get older and older (and more and more out of date). Want to delete your email address off of the Web? Sorry, thanks to other systems Facebook can’t ensure that’ll happen.

Now, I’ve been on both sides of this story. A few months ago I tried using some unreleased technology from Plaxo to do exactly what Google did on Monday night. I not only got kicked off of the API (which is what should have happened) but my account was hidden and I was locked out for about 20 hours.

Facebook’s “penalty” for that behavior was way too harsh. And, some, like John Furrier, believe that Facebook is on the wrong side of the line tonight again.

Me? I think Facebook has a point, but I think the horse is out of the barn already and Facebook won’t be able to shove it back in.

Why? You should check into Minggl. It’s a toolbar that does far more than what Google’s Friend Connect does.

But it does it in a way that Facebook will never be able to block. Why? Because it’s your browser that scrapes all your friend’s info into Minggl’s browser bar. That bar then uploads all that information back up to Minggl. There’s no way that Facebook will be able to block Minggl. If Google wants to push the issue they should do exactly what Minggl is doing.

To get geeky for a moment, Minngl is collecting that data with a separate IP address each time the same one your browser is using. If Facebook wants to block Minngl it’ll have to block you from browsing to Facebook. Facebook can’t do that to everyone, so Minggl has picked an architecture that makes it impossible for Facebook to block. At least using technical methods. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook tried to sue Minggl or other companies that use similar methods to collect data.

Privacy is dead.

Anyone who puts anything on a computer screen that they want hidden from public view should think again. I don’t think it can be stopped and the walled gardens that have built around Facebook and other social networks are temporarily walled at best. That data WILL leak out of the walls and already is. Facebook’s attempt to keep the walls up will prove unsuccessful.

Just ask former KGO Radio Talk Show host Bernie Ward. He was convicted of sending child pornography through email to someone else. If email isn’t a private medium then surely Facebook isn’t. (The person he was emailing those photos to emailed them to the authorities).

What do you think? Does Facebook have a point or is the horse already out of the barn?

UPDATE: This is being discussed at a much faster rate over on FriendFeed than over here.

UPDATE2: Google employee Kevin Marks says I’m wrong in comments here. Here’s his correction to this post: “Robert, you’re wrong about Friend Connect data getting stale. It’s fetched directly from your linked Friend Data sources, including other Social Networks, with short-term caching on Friend Connect servers. There is a live two-way connection – Friend Connect posts back events to the Social Networks’ activity streams when the user choses to do so.”

UPDATE3: Mike Arrington over on TechCrunch thinks I’m wrong on this post. But, if you read the comments over on his blog you’ll see we’re not that far apart.

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On the Facebook Developers blog, Charlie Cheever says Friend Connect, Google’s Open Social-based program allowing webmasters to integrate social networking features on their sites, doesn’t measure up privacy-wise:

…we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

Google launched Friend Connect soon after Facebook released Facebook Connect, which was released shortly after MySpace launched its own service called Data Availability. All aim to integrate features of those networks into other sites.

To add social networking features to any web site, you can get code from Google (although, unfortunately, the site does not work until tonight) and pick which features you want to add. The code will allow people register on your site, invite other people, import friends lists, see who else is on the site, and post messages and reviews.

According to their press release: “Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.”

So, Marketing Pilgrim could add some features without hiring a programmer. While it won’t be a full-blown social network, you could see other Marketing Pilgrim readers and interact with them with one login. That’s the idea.

Friend Connect will work with existing standards such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with data access APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. The sites are trying to compete in becoming the repository of information from which other sites draw from.

According to TechCrunch, Google sees Friend Connect as a small step towards Google’s larger goal of letting people connect to any friend on any application, on any site.

Google Friend Connect is in a preview release and will start with a group of sites that Google has picked.

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