News from Facebook last week on their new product, Facebook Connect:

Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.

It seems they were hot on the heels of their competitor, MySpace, who released their new, similar product initiative, MySpace Data Availability only the day before:

MySpace, the world’s most popular social network, alongside Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, today announced the launch of the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, a ground-breaking offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile data to websites of their choice throughout the Internet. Today’s announcement throws open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and Web identity. The launch of the Data Availability initiative marks the first time that a social Website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.

And today Google has jumped into the fray with an announcement of Friend Connect:

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

So it seems that all the big players in the social networking game are really trying to solve the troublesome matter of identity as it pertains to Web 2.0. Techdirt has a nice write up on the evolution of the “walled garden” social networks and points out the the privacy concerns that go along with aggregating so much personal data across several websites. Users, too, face choices in the constantly changing social sphere. How much personal data are they willing to share with websites? Do the benefits of increased connectivity outweigh the potential risks?

ReputationDefender supports these new developments in the social networking realm and looks forward to a solution to online reputation management that is both functional and secure.

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