The excuses for not beat blogging are becoming harder and harder to swallow. Don’t have the technical tools? Not enough time to alter your website?

Tonight Google released Friend connect.

When I first learned about OpenSocial I talked about it with the 13 beat bloggers quickly and said: "you probably won’t need to worry about OpenSocial, right now it’s just for developers and we won’t see a practical application for about one year."

I will now take off my hat and tip it towards Google and then proceed to eat it. They managed to get a practical application of OpenSocial in seven months. Bad news for Facebook, good news for beat blogging.