Not to be outdone by recent news of advancements in adoption of Facebook Connect, Google launched their Friend Connect beta site today.

Google’s Friend Connect differs from Facebook Connect in that it’s leveraging open standards (OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial) instead of the (arguably) closed and proprietary Facebook Connect standard.

Google also launched a developer site with a quick guide on integrating Friend Connect into web applications.

Google’s Friend Connect can also allow users to sign into your applications with their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account.  One thing that I wonder is: was Microsoft just too early to market with .NET Passport, or was it simply because it was Microsoft pushing what looked like a closed and proprietary standard that caused adoption to be so poor that .NET Passport wasn’t more widely adopted?

One final note: as great as it will be to cut down on the number of accounts that one needs to create and remember across the web, many people have expressed concerns about losing the perceived anonymity when commenting on blogs and posting messages in discussion forums.   Being able to register as multiple different names when posting comments on blogs does provide one with a little separation between your identity across the web, so it will be interesting to see how and where these emerging identity standards will be used.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Google, Social Computing