Gommit

Google and Facebook are embracing the free flow of social activities between websites with the aim of providing the infrastructure (pipes) that the data passes through.

Facebook connect was launched yesterday. The aim is to enable 3rd party sites to tap into the social graph of 120 million active Facebook users and allow those users to use their profile, login, and friend connections on external sites and then post activities back to their Facebook profile.

Pluck, the company I now work has already implemented this feature for SFGate.com where you can post your news comments to your Facebook profile:

Google incidentally launched their Friend Connect at the same time. You can use your GMail account or any OpenID account and they also support OAuth data portability standard.

The boundaries of social sites are blurring and I'm quite psyched about the potential this has for the future of the interwebs. I have a dream where I just have one user profile and can use that to aggregate all my online social activities into one stream. Let the sign up forms be a thing of the past.

The fight is on between Facebook and Google who is going to own the infrastructure for this.