Google Friend Connect – wow, that was back in the days when Web 2.0 was ‘the thing’ and there was a lot of openness and experimentation on the web for developers.
Some things are better now of course: There are so many free development platforms now and very powerful APIs and such.
But the semantic web has been subsumed by corporate (there’s big money to be made and they’re making it) and I watched all the wonderful resources begin to shut down two years later in 2010, more in 2011, and almost all gone by 2012. Google Friend Connect transformed into something different, a more centralized social network and centralization has become more and more of the focus as decentralization became axed yet again, as it once had in the mid 90s. Ebb and flow.
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