Some time ago I wrote that a war was coming, yesterday the strike begun.

Yesterday, Google and Facebook both launched their respective “connect” infrastructure. I received the Google mail announcement at 6pm and Facebook announced it on the developers’ blog at 12pm. I actually had subscribed to receive news from Facebook Connect but never received any mail. It seems like Google has credit for the first move.

This morning, I started trying to add “Connect” features to this site…

Google Friend Connect

I started by adding the Google Friend Connect widget (it is still there).

It initially took me less than 5 minutes to setup my Google Friend Connect account and get working code for a widget to put in here. As easy as using Google AdSense, follow the wizard and you are done. It then took me 5 other minutes to tweak the site’s design.

10 minutes and every Google, Orkut or Plaxo user can register to this site and I can invite my friends on those platform to join me in. Problem is I do not use Orkut nor Plaxo and a very small amount of my friends actually have a Google account.

But they almost all have a Facebook account.

Facebook Connect

Then, I went to the Facebook Connect documentation and followed the instructions.

Instead of a wizard and files to download you have to follow instructions, create new files and copy/paste code. And then you can have a “Facebook Connect” button on your site. Nothing else. To do more you need to understand the Facebook platform, read the documentation and hand-code some FBML.

This is going to take me more than 10 minutes to be able to invite my friends here…

I guess the Google announcement forced them to release Facebook Connect with missing bits but there already seem to be rumors about a Connect plugin for WordPress. I think I can wait a week or two :)

The Winner

Facebook wins, my mother is on Facebook…

Image Credits: saidunsaids