Gigya and Janrain Partner With Google+ for Social Sign-In

Google has partnered with two services offering web publishers easy integration with social networks’ identity systems. Gigya and Janrain both said on Tuesday that they had partnered with Google to allow website visitors the option of signing in via Google+. The partnerships give Google+ Sign-In quick and easy distribution to hundreds of websites.

Both Janrain and Gigya shield publishers from the task of integrating individually with the APIs of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the host of smaller networks out there. (Janrain says it supports more than 30 identity providers.)

“If you’re a website looking to get up and running but not using a solution like ours, you have to go to Google and integrate with their APIs, and then go everywhere else. That’s a significant amount of development work required,” says Michael Olson, Janrain’s product marketing manager. “Our user management platform helps websites acquire more users online and then learn more about them.”

Janrain customer Universal Music Group Distribution said it had integrated Google+ Sign-In.

Gigya has taken advantage of a couple features added to Google+ Sign-In: letting consumers share content via Google+ and downloading an app to an Android phone. When users log into sites with their Google+ identities, publishers can prompt them to download branded Google Android applications via over-the-air installs. Because of its merged identity system, Google can match fans who log into a website with their Android mobile phone accounts, as well.

Gigya customer Fox Broadcasting is working on a mobile integration for AmericanIdol.com, according to Gigya chief executive Patrick Salyer. Site visitors can be offered a quick download of an Android app that lets them get regular updates from the show and its stars.

“This is a great example of the power of the Google network leveraging other Google properties,” he says.

According to Salyer, this is only the beginning of what Google could do with its user profiles. He imagines combining Google+ with Google Search, so that if, for example a consumer logged into a particular news website via Google+, Google could promote that site higher in search results.

“All of a sudden, Google knows my preference in news; they can see the frequency with which I log in. then, when I go to Google Search and am logged in with my Google+ identity, they can change search results based on my news preferences.” Salyer says.

If that sounds scary, Gigya also provides a social privacy certification that assures website visitors that the site will not sell their social information nor use it wrongly.

When consumers choose to log in via a specific social network, they also give permission for that network to share their preferences and other information with the website. Both Gigya and Janrain help publishers make use of that rich public profile data, which may include email addresses and people in their circles.

The Janrain User Management Platform (JUMP) includes, in addition to social login, social sharing, social profile data collection and storage, access to the social graph, and digital strategy services.

While Google’s late-to-the-social-network-party offering is often characterized as floundering, Janrain’s upcoming Quarterly Social Login Trends Report found that Google continues to gain social login market share, with more than a third of online consumers choosing to use their Google credentials to log in to the websites of Janrain customers.