Google Friend Connect vs Facebook's Connect

Wow, talk about timing - both were released yesterday almost at the same time even. For once I think Google was out done a bit as Facebook was a bit more organised having allowed some big websites to implement and test the features way before its release so that on the day sites like TechCrunch had already implemented Facebook Connect.

I've been playing around with a both and here is a quick early summary:

Google Friend Connect is very very easy to implement and adds nice structure to quickly have a login system that works pretty well and allow users to write on a wall or make reviews but it stops about there. For it to be so simple its gone and created widgets to just implement and so for me even though it only took me 30min to implement it is not enough...

Facebook Connect now here is something powerful... just go look at TechCrunch and see how nicely it works! The 2 things that make this the better option for me are:
1) the posting to your Facebook wall of your activities outside of Facebook
2) the ability to see what your friends have done on the website when browsing it, makes it a lot more trustworthy when you see your friends have been using it.

I will be following this up some more after I've used both a bit more.

Facebook Connect

Finally, a new breakthrough with something that could be quite useful if used the right way.

View this report here from Mark Roff at the F8 announcement by Mark Zuckerberg.

The summary of the change here is that if the user gives the website permission a 3rd Party website, like MyKindaPrices.com can work with info coming from the users Facebook profile and display it on the website.

Another example is a website that does restaurant reviews, if you view that website there could be a 'Friends Fav' tab on the side with reviews on restaurants from your friends on Facebook which should hopefully be trustworthy.

This is a development that I see could really make Facebook the only player in the social web, I don't see major websites having 3/4 different tabs on the side to account for every Social website... Then again if Facebook adopted Google's OpenSocial it could work very well. We'll see.

For now its amazing to see that Facebook has reached 90million users after only having 24million 14months ago. WOW, is all I can say.