Google just announced a set of gadgets and standards under the moniker “Friend Connect.” I am really intrigued with what they are providing with this effort. The main concept is to provide a set of tools that can easily be dropped into any Website to add eCommunity type features. Because this set of tools adheres to their Open Social standard, this means that when you drop a “Friends” gadget into your Website, you are now bringing along all of your friends to the site, and allowing others to do the same. There are also handy gadgets that let you do things like setup us a rating system for items on your site – ala Digg.com. As you will see from the “how to” video at the link above, it is pretty easy to drop these components into an existing site to add lots of new and cool functionality – specifically, Web 2.0 types of functions. Once these components are on the site, you get the free use of the code.

All of this if pretty nice of Google to do on our behalf so let’s look at what their motivation might be. Google makes its’ money from providing free tools that the masses fall in love with. Once millions of people are hooked on them, Google monetizes them in some way – very successfully I might add. So in this case, they are providing free Web based gadgets for us to use, and will surely put some type of advertising over them at some point. This allows Google to extend into more places and to get in front of more eyeballs. For most people, the trade off of a little marketing will be worthwhile.

Let’s look at this from a whole different view… Google is providing gadget applications, widgets, that hook to their standards and provide interesting functionality. It seems to me that we are heading more and more to a world that is component software based, and can be assembled by novice users. Google is certainly smart enough to see that if they can control billions of gadgets being used out in the marketplace, they will have a whole new set of real estate to earn money from. It boggles my mind a bit to think about how far this could go. Will they someday come out with free accounting systems? Free CRM system? Will the subsume open source standards and give away all software for the chance to earn advertising dollars? This may not be too far fetched because it would be pretty easy to pay for the underlying code pretty quickly by giving it away to millions of people. Hey, thats what they are doing already. Think about a free version of Quicken? Then a free version of a Microsoft Dynamics equivalent accounting system? Maybe we are headed for a world where all software is free, you just rent it with your eyeballs so to speak…

Scott

(Editorial Note: Free software is becoming more common, as Scott points to in this article. Now we are seeing free cell phones pop up, again, ad supported. Basic television programming has always been free, you just have to sit through the commercials, the advertisements. In 1999 we saw a line of free, ad supported, personal computers; though that model failed almost a decade ago the times are clearly changing in its favor again. I wonder how long until we see ads wrapped around our fast food hamburgers?)