Sharing peaks on-site with Friend Connect | Tuesday, December 23 2008 | posted in Web Apps
Google announced on Monday, December 15, that its much hyped Friend Connect service is now available for site integration, after months of its first announcement. Basically the service lets webmasters add social features and gadgets, such as Facebook’s wall gadget, a comment gadget, friend invites and a rating system. The most interesting part is that visitors to your site can partake in your micro community by logging into the service with any Google, Yahoo, AIM, OpenID information.
This effort is impressive given the fact that people have had to create a new user account whenever they wanted to join a social network. More interesting is the fact that you can also publish or export data to your, for example, Facebook profile or status message so that your friends know what you are doing at any time.
The launch is coming almost six months after Google first announced the efforts, user’s who couldn’t wait have been able to try the preview version for some months now. The delay was mainly due to the difficulty in porting data between the different social networks that Friends Connect would support.
Setting up Friends connect on the dcs blog took less than ten minutes and required no programming know how.
Once I had it up on the blog, the service already detected my Gmail account session and logged me in, and I could immediately invite friends from my Gmail contact list, post my status update on Facebook. It’s really a mind blower. With this service users can now, more than ever, interact with dcs site content and with other members of the dcs site community. Wow!
Google is trying to sign up with more social sites, so that more of your friends can connect and share data right from your site and in your site. Already sharing extends to MySpace, Facebook, Delicio.us, Digg, Orkut, LinkedIn. What better time to stay in touch with family and friends than Christmas, try it out, blog side.
Once I had it up on the blog, the service already detected my Gmail account session and logged me in, and I could immediately invite friends from my Gmail contact list, post my status update on Facebook. It’s really a mind blower. With this service users can now, more than ever, interact with dcs site content and with other members of the dcs site community. Wow!
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