Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

Full article: techcrunch.com 

Labels: Facebook, Friend Connect, Orkut, social

The intruder appears relatively harmless--and now halted--but raises security concerns.

Google's Orkut social networking site appeared to have been hit by a relatively harmless worm, but one that demonstrated the continuing vulnerability of Web applications.

Some Orkut users received an e-mail telling them they had been sent a new scrapbook entry -- a type of Orkut message -- on their profile from another Orkut user.

They only had to view their profile to become infected by the worm, which added them to an Orkut group, "Infectados pelo Vírus do Orkut," wrote the blogger Kee Hinckley on his site TechnoSocial.

Full story: pcworld.com 

Labels: hackers, Network, Orkut, social, worm