Google: “Today, we’re bringing Twitter and Friend Connect even closer together. Now you can join one of over nine million Google Friend Connect sites using your Twitter login. Once signed in, your Twitter profile will be automatically linked and you can tweet your new site membership, share discussions from the comments gadget, and invite your friends via Twitter.”

VB: “What’s interesting is the timing of Google’s announcement. It comes on the same day Facebook announced a massive integration with Yahoo’s properties, handing the social network an additional way to reach 500 million people. A big win. Yahoo users can use their Facebook log-ins to see what friends are doing on its properties and share that activity with their social network. – Google, however, doesn’t really have a large sharing platform. It has Orkut and Google Reader, but those haven’t found the same traction as Twitter or Facebook have with audiences closing in on half a billion users. It also wants to prevent the growth of closed or unfriendly ecosystems. So it’s turning to Twitter in a reactive move against its emerging competitor Facebook.”

TC: “So will Twitter integration help Friend Connect spread the way Facebook Connect is? Probably not since Twitter has nowhere near the 350 million users that Facebook does, but this is a nice addition that certainly can’t hurt. We’ve been saying for months that Twitter should have its own ‘Connect’ platform, which is sort of does in some ways, but this takes it a lot closer.”

RWW: “Identity is a very important matter online, particularly as everything becomes more social. Online identity is your address book, it’s your wallet, it’s your reputation and it could become a lot more. … Facebook and Twitter are becoming big Identity providers. Google and Yahoo! have wanted to be leading Identity providers themselves but today cried Uncle with a big nod to the supremacy of the two leading social networks. … Those small players, people working on things like OpenID, ActivityStreams, the distributed social graph and other components of distributed, independent and interoperable social networking – those players may have been sold down the river by today’s deals between Yahoo and Google and Facebook and Twitter. … The short-term trade of giving more control to two big social networks, in exchange for traffic and ad money, may not serve anyone well in the long run.“