Google Friend Connect Makes Any Site Social
Published by Rodney Rumford May 12th, 2008 in Google, OpenSocial, business, social media.
Google will officially announce a preview release of Google Friend Connect in about an hour. I will be on the conference call to learn as much as possible as to how Google Friend Connect will work.
Here is what we know for sure at this point:
The Friend Connect service will help website owners grow engagement by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social, and now they can be, in a relatively easy fashion.
With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
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.
There is an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.
This is fundamentally game changing for many sites as it will add a social layer to that users experience if properly integrated. Sites and widgets can instantly provide a social layer of engagement that was not possible previously.
Sample site showing Google Friend Connect Integrated
Google Friend Connect Set up area
We will be a Google Campfire tonight and get some video interviews & some additional details & friend connect insights.
TechCrunch also has some thoughts on Friend Connect.
Technorati Tags: google, friend connect, google friend connect
WOW! Keep us posted. Sounds like a real breakthrough. My only wish is that Google stuff looked better. It really kills me that it still looks like the 1990s web design. Functionality is great. Aesthetics is not.