Achieving the balance

One of the things that stuck in my mind after yesterday’s post on Google’s friend connect announcement was “How do we maintain our social status while keeping not over exposing ourselves?”

I think this article, Achieving Balance in a Social World, gives a fair balance of how we should be using our twitters, blogs and networking sites. But the disturbing question came at the end…

“It’s a big, interconnected web world out there. And it’s about to get even more connected with the launch of Google Friend Connect.

Imagine what will happen to the web when any website has the ability to become its own social network. What will that do to our current networks? How will it help or hurt social media and web 2.0 evangelists?”

Who can say now? Only time will tell… Obviously there are 2 ways it can go. One, we will be aghast that our private lives have been invaded and the link (open social apps) between the silos (Individual Networking Sites) would collapse and we would revert back to what we had previously.

A second alternative , we set up barriers and our profile is limited yet connected. In addition, we will see an influx of PR and marketing people trying to build stakeholder or brand relationships with consumers.

How-To: Launching and monetizing a Facebook Application

The write up above shows how to use an open social app for marketing and PR people, like the one facebook launched. Would that be the way to go for communications and marketing professionals in the use of social media then?

Well, I’m hoping to get some answers from the experts, I’m gonna surf ard too see what our gurus think!

Google’s Friend Connect

Today’s media monitoring for me was being hammered by Goggle’s Friend connect, you can try out the beta version here. Based on their open social concept, Google is basically trying to make the web more social. The video below is a good summary of what’s been going on and what will happen with web 2.0.

Of course, the main issues are how do we balance this openness, which will invade our privacy as a user, yet wanting to make ourselves social at the same time.

So there’re 3 ways to protect ourselves:

1. Open Id
2. oauth
3. Open social

Some have speculated this as Google’s way to enter the social networking domains and trying to get social ad money from it. And i think it should, it just strengthens their stronghold on the internet as web2.0 becomes more prevalent.

This prevalence is a trend which is worth mentioning, the release comes days after facebook and myspace have opened up their sites to allow users to share their profiles on other sites. Google is trying to, like the video said, be a ‘saltshaker’ that sprinkles social all over the web.

It’s going to be interesting to note the debelopments on the social networking industry as end users try to establish stronger online identities through more being more ‘social’. In addition, its going to be interesting to see how companies react to this and how PR or marketing professionals are going to use this build stronger relationships with consumers.

Till the next time, I’ll end off with a video on how the friend connect works (I bet the guy doing the video just woke up)