Today, one of the most discussed items over at FriendFeed revolves around a question asked by FriendFeed founder and former Googler, Paul Buchheit. He asks something I’m beginning to wonder myself:

“What does it mean to "join" a website with Google Friend Connect? After joining, the main difference seems to be the lack of a "Join" button. Is there any other benefit?”

I talked a bit about this here at SiliconANGLE a few weeks ago:

Some time back, I wrote an article on Google’s Friend Connect which attracted a comment from Google’s Matt Cutts. The article was entitled “What is Google Going to Do with Lifestreaming?” Matt had asked me there what I’d reccomend Google do to provide a better value to me as a publisher and website owner.

[…]

The Friend Connect system seems to create a type of lifestreaming system – if comments or logins are made to GFC enabled sites, they show up in the users profile.  That data doesn’t seem to be exportable, usable or searchable in any way.  You can’t generate discussions around the data, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to browse your friend’s lifestreams without manually clicking on each profile.

In essence, the data exists, but it isn’t that usable. It does exist, though, as an exoskeleton of sorts for a FriendFeed like system.

To respond to Matt, though, I’d have to say that the data being volunteered by my site and it’s users should provide some return to us as bloggers.  There are a number of ways that Google can use that data to increase the value of their own ad networks, but in it’s current form, it serves neither to enrich my community nor the interaction between my users.

SxSW happened, and I didn’t have a chance to follow up with Matt at the event to get his further thoughts on the topic.

Paul Buchheit, though, raises a lot of the same sentiments amongst the community there at FriendFeed I have had – the Google Friend Connect system doesn’t seem to offer much benefit or community, other than having a MyBlogLog style widget on the side of the screen.

Sure, you can use the system to replace whatever commenting feature you may currently have installed on your blog, but without any syndication ability or lifestreaming, it offers no discernible benefit over any existing third party commenting system, and certainly nothing over what exists with Facebook’s system, Facebook Connect.

Here were some other comments from that thread I found to be poignant:

Apart from getting one step closer towards Google-mediated/provided single sign-on, maybe the idea is/was to attract the "earliest" adopters before additional features are introduced for a greater benefit… Such features could be OpenSocial integration, article digests, comment digests, having your GFC social graph accessible from GMail, maybe even Google Reader, etc. Am I making any sense? :-) – Nenad Nikolic via twhirl

If a site is using the Google Friend Connect API, you can often leave comments with your Google, Yahoo, or AIM account very easily. – Matt Cutts

I have a video demo with Kevin Marks of Google, which shows you some of what Google’s FriendConnect does:

– Robert Scoble

Robert, your video doesn’t seem to explain the benefit of joining a site. Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff you can do on a site if you have an OpenID account, but why do you need to join it to take advantage of any of it? If Google Friend Connect is supposed to be this truly open and portable social network, having to "join" sites seems to be counterproductive towards that goal. – Mark Trapp

Are we all missing something? I’d be more than happy to be shown how I’m completely missing the boat on this. I want to love Google Friend Connect, but it’s just not creating that spark for me yet. 

GFC, maybe it’s not you, it’s me. Your rejoinder?