Google today announced a new partnership with social login providers Janrain and Gigya that will bring its Google+ sign-ins to thousands of new sites. In February, Google launched Google+ sign-ins to developers who can use it on the web and for their Android and iOS apps and starting today, all of the 400,000 sites that use Janrain to provide social logins and the 600,000 sites deployed across Gigya‘s 650 premium clients can now use all of the features that come with Google’s new and improved sign-in service.
As Google product management director Seth Sternberg told me yesterday, developers obviously like the fact that they can use this service to easily enable two-factor authentication on their sites. In his view, however, there are two breakout features that so far have been more successful than Google expects: over-the-air Android installs – which check if a website user also own an Android phone and lets you install a site’s mobile app with just a click – and the interactive posts to Google+ that are made possible through the new sign-in infrastructure. While he didn’t share any concrete numbers, Sternberg said that the interactive posts have resulted in “fantastic interaction rates” and that people who see them are “disproportionately likely to interact with them.”
For publishers and other website owners who use Janrain and Gigya, this new feature means that they can also pull in more information about their users. The regular Google login, after all, isn’t coupled to a social network so while they could get more information about their users from Facebook and Twitter, users who used Google’s old sign-ins remained relatively anonymous.
As Janrain’s CEO Larry Drebes told me yesterday, he believes that this will be the main reason for many of the 400,000 sites in the company’s network to switch (which only takes a few clicks for companies that already use his service). About a third of Janrain’s users currently use their Google credentials to log in to its partner sites, and as Drebes told me, Google’s numbers are growing at the expense of Facebook.
Some of the Janrain customers that are enabling Google+ sign-ins at launch include NPR, HSN.com and Universal Music, so Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber fans can now sign in to their idols’ websites with their Google+ credentials.
On Gigya, American Idol and other Fox Broadcasting properties will enable Google+ sign-ins at launch, as well as Food Network UK. As the company’s CEO Patrick Salyer told me, the company provides social infrastructure services to 48 of the top 100 largest websites and that more than 1.5 billion users touch its services in some form every month.
Salyer also has an interesting theory about how Google could use the data it gets through Google+ sign-ins. What if, he said, Google used this data to also personalize its search results at some point? If you use Google+ sign-ins to regularly sign in to a newspaper website, for example, Google could push those results to the top of its search results pages. Chances are, after all, that this is a source you trust.