Google Friend Connect Now Serverside

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed — was off Techmeme within hours).  When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it.  I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” — and now Google has shown that they are taking this in the direction that it needs to go.  As I wrote yesterday, I believe that this is by and large good news for owners of smaller sites and services.  Still, I am hoping to see an independent service arise that does the same by combining smaller sites into a network.  Now that one can compare the Google and Facebook Connect APIs (something I am planning to do this weekend), the structure of such an API should be fairly clear.