Up until now, social networking sites haven’t proven to be great places for real estate agents to promote their services.  In addition, I haven’t spoken to anyone who thinks social networking sites have been good places to expand their networks in any meaningful way.  If you’ve had a different experience, please speak up!

According to the 2007 NAR Profile on Buyers and Sellers, 68% of the buyers who participated in the survey have never used a social networking web site.  But, I’m wondering if that situation is going to change.

Soon, Any Site Will Be Able to Turn Itself Into a Social Networking Website

Hot on the heels of the announcements by MySpace and Facebook, Google has announced the “preview release” of a product called Google Friend Connect.  By the time you read this, you should be able to get more information at http://www.google.com/friendconnect.  That site is supposed to be live after Google’s Campfire meeting the evening of May 12.

Preliminary Friend Connect Functionality 

So, what is Friend Connect?  Certainly, there will be much more information as time goes on.  But, here’s a user-friendly description as I currently understand it.

Background:

• Right now, there are many social networks out there.  Each network maintains its own data.  If you’re on Facebook, you still need to create a new account if you want to be on MySpace.
• The long-term goal is to create an Internet world where you only have to join one social network site – from that point on, your network will “follow you” to any other sites with a social networking component.  For example,
  • If you have signed up at Facebook, when you go to MySpace you can login with your Facebook ID.
• It’s not clear to me exactly how the interface will work.  Will all your friends on Facebook end up on MySpace if youjoin both networks?  Or, will you be able to interact with only your friends who have also joined MySpace?  Google has said that some type of permission will have to be given, but we’ll need more insight on how that will actually work.

Now, Enter Capabilities like Friend Connect:

• According to Google, Friend Connect is “a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.”
• Any website will be able to add social networking features that will reside on their site in an I-Frame.
• That should mean that if I added Friend Connect to this Blog, for example, I’d create a new Social Networking page and frame-in the code to provide the Friend Connect capability.
• At that point, visitors to the blog will be able to interact with existing friends and add new friends to their network from among the people who have signed in to the social networking capability on this blog.

Google describes the benefit this way: 

Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites.

• Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
• Increase engagement:access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
• Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

The techies are having discussions about whether there is enough compatibility among the different information structures used by various networking sites, and whether the major players should be working together or working independently as they seem to be doing now, banking on open architecture to get all the various data bases to talk to each other to exchange information.

From what I can tell, it sounds like we’re still a ways away from total integration.  But, I think the concept of providing social networking capability on any website is something worth watching very carefully. 

Maybe I’m just getting old, but part of me does wonder if all this accessibility might get to be too much.  If everyone you’re connected to on LinkedIn, for example, finds a great new website and either connects you to it, or sends you an invitation to connect to it…  Will we have any time to do anything besides sit at our computers in a fog??

Any other reactions??