http://www.ceveni.com/2008/09/why-facebook-is-confusing-and-mess.html

Incidentally, the fact that Google’s Friend Connect site doesn’t explain the stuff you do in your comment is a failing, I think–it’s really a poorly-documented service from a consumer standpoint.

–Harry

In fact, Ning’s own Marc Andreessen said the following back in May: http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/05/friend-connect.html

I’d like to discuss Google’s new Friend Connect initiative and how we plan to support it at Ning.

We at Ning think that Friend Connect is a great idea, and has huge potential to make Open Social even more functional and widely available for a broad swath of our users and Network Creators on Ning and throughout the web.

However, in the last couple days, there’s been some confusion around the idea that perhaps Friend Connect is somehow competitive with Ning — which is odd, because we don’t think so and because we think it’s obvious that it’s not. So let me start by first explaining what Friend Connect is, and then how Ning is going to implement it.

Friend Connect is a mechanism by which Open Social gadgets can be published and used not just within a social network but also beyond that social network. When an Open Social gadget shows up elsewhere on the web, via Friend Connect, the friend data and social context comes with the Open Social gadget from its origin social network — and that origin social network might be a network on Ning or a large walled garden network like MySpace or Orkut, and that Open Social gadget might be embedded on any page anywhere on the web.