Open Beta of Google Friend Connect Coming Soon?
Just about half a year ago, Google announced a limited beta of Friend Connect, which allows site owners to display OpenSocial based gadgets on their sites and site visitors to sign in to these social gadgets with their OpenID, AIM, Yahoo, or Google accounts.
Amit Agarwal has been keeping a close eye on Friend Connect since it was announced and he assumes that the service could go live pretty soon. Just last week, Google published a new YouTube video geared towards users and now the support site for Friend Connect is available as well.
Some of the gadgets Google currently supplies are a comment wall and a ratings gadget. Friend Connect will also work with third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community. To enable these gadgets, all a site owner has to do is to copy and paste some code snippets into their site's HTML.
Google Profiles Meets MyBlogLog
Lately, Google has started to put a lot more emphasis on its own user profiles, and Friend Connect makes good use of them. Once you join a Friend Connect enabled site, other users will be able to see information from your profile, though you can set your privacy settings to disallow others from seeing your profile pages as well. In many ways, this is quite similar to MyBlogLog.
It's Social, But is it Open?
When Friend Connect was first announced, we were concerned about the direction Google was taking with this implementation of the OpenSocial standards. Also, as we noted in our earlier posts, the Friend Connect apps are displayed in an iframe, which is basically a separate web page inside another web page. Because of this, these apps are black boxes that live on your site, but don't allow the site owners to really leverage the data from these apps on their own sites.
It is interesting to note that the latest Google video about Friend Connect still prominently features Facebook as a supported service, even though Facebook has decided to eschew OpenSocial in favor of its own platform. The help pages for Friend Connect don't feature a list of supported services yet.
Benefits
There are, however, also some clear benefits to using Friend Connect. Through this service, a site owner might be able to create more user loyalty and enthusiastic readers can evangelize your site by publishing their activity on it to their own social network. Visitors will also be able to invite their friends on social networks to join your site.
In an early press release about Friend Connect, Google stated that this initiative was about helping the 'long tail' of sites to become more social. While we might worry about some of the details of Google's implementation, this by itself is a worthy cause, and it will be interesting to see how site owners will implement Friend Connect once it becomes publically available.
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I am wondering about the potential uses for google friend connect. Could it help with ecommerce? Can it streamline the registration process for ecommerce purposes on my web site? Anybody with thoughts on that subject, I like to hear it. Thanks.
The one thing that is key is the support for oauth and friends. People will be able to subscribe/follow their friends via oauth.
Equally Google Profile recently added lifestream functionality. Somewhere in Google's or another company as yet unknown future is an app to challenge twitter/friendfeed expect it will be a distributed solution.
i.e I will subscribe/follow friends from google, yahoo, microsoft via oauth and they will give me permission. Using SREG I will get a level of granularity of info and they can unfollow by revoking my oauth permission. This new app will aggregate my social graph and their lifestreams for me just as the twitter/friendfeed silos do today.
Watch this space for the new app.
I'm looking forward to seeing where they go with this.
Google is growing day by day because its services are use ful for internet users and almost all the services are free
It's taken an age for Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect, announced in the same week I recall, to get any further than the rhetorik. I questioned why Facebook were doing such a thing back then because, to me, it gave lots of reasons to use my Facebook ID away from their site -- something of a problem for a site that only currently makes revenue from on-site advertising.
Google doesn't have this porblem because its advertising reach spreads web-wide, of course. And maybe spreading its traffic across the web to other sites carrying Adsense means everyone is a winner...?
Still, I agree with the post above that I really wanted to see GFC move forward more aggressivley in terms of features. What social networking is crying out for is a simpler implementation of OpenID, with OpenAuth and other OpenSocial elements also enabling the social graph to be taken around all sites, with friends you establish on one site automatically being connections on another. When someone (Google?) cracks this then the "Open" part will be better deserved in my mind.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
their site -- something of a problem for a site that only currently makes revenue from on-site advertising.
I have been watching Friend Connect very closely, but this guy just caught another set of changes.
The Friend Connect example sites just changed. The text for the sign up link is different and now Google is advertising this new text in sponsored search above results. Good catch:
http://www.googlingsocial.com
Thanks Frederic, Looks very interesting, I wonder how good it will be at referring social invites, compared to individual social network referrals.
Google Friend Connect is NOW in Open Beta! Want proof? Go to my little Naples, FL website at:
http://free.naplesplus.us
and see.
It's exciting to me, as I've been anxiously awaiting its arrival for six months now.
The setup process was SO SIMPLE, it blew my mind.
Within 10 minutes, it was up and running and ready. I think good things are coming with Google Friend Connect.
Kenneth Udut, webmaster of http://free.naplesplus.us