Google Friend Connect Makes Sites More Social
Monday, May 12th, 2008;
-- Janet Meiners |
First MySpace announced data portability, then Facebook announced Connect, and now Google has Friend Connect. Each is making it easier to share profile information from one social networking site to other web sites (and hoping to be place you go to do that). Google’s Friend Connect was announced today.
To add social networking features to any web site, you can get code from Google (although, unfortunately, the site does not work until tonight) and pick which features you want to add. The code will allow people register on your site, invite other people, import friends lists, see who else is on the site, and post messages and reviews.
According to their press release: “Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.”
So, Marketing Pilgrim could add some features without hiring a programmer. While it won’t be a full-blown social network, you could see other Marketing Pilgrim readers and interact with them with one login. That’s the idea.
Friend Connect will work with existing standards such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with data access APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. The sites are trying to compete in becoming the repository of information from which other sites draw from.
According to TechCrunch, Google sees Friend Connect as a small step towards Google’s larger goal of letting people connect to any friend on any application, on any site.
Google Friend Connect is in a preview release and will start with a group of sites that Google has picked.
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May 12th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Nice to see social networks coming together to offer download and upload options cross-platform friendly. Sort of a social RSS feed of information.
Jaan Kanellis’s last blog post..SEO Analogies Help Us Understand
May 12th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
This will be a great social media help for small websites that don’t have the resources to hire a programmer
Social Marketing Journal’s last blog post..Social Marketing Etiquette
May 12th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Great summary on the topic Janet.
I’m sitting here staring at a pile of fliers from SXSW interactive for companies that do just what Google’s doing here for free.
I actually think it might help some of the premium social software providers, as it will expose more webmasters to this type of functionality.
Sometimes you need the free option before graduating to a premium one.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I really like to see all those developments in America, to bad here in EU things are not going that fast. We got some cool gadgets awaiting for http://www.hypotheekindex.nl but time is to early
May 12th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
David Glazer of Google says it best.
This truly is “Plumbing for the rest of the Web”
Jerry Hart’s last blog post..First Female Iraqi soldier loses her leg and reset the bar for “Hard Work”
May 12th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Don’t call it Google if is stop improving.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:09 am
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May 15th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
How will this affect SEO?
Allan’s last blog post..Google Commoditizing Networks
May 19th, 2008 at 8:00 am
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