Finding Other Members

The central idea behind these updates is that Google wants to make it easier for users on a site to connect and get to know each other. The new "Interests" section on Friend Connect is the hub for most of these new features. This is a poll with very specific questions that will appear when they join the site.

In Google's example, a site owner who runs a site about guitars could ask members what kind of guitar they play, what their favorite amplifier is, or if they consider themselves experts or beginners. All the data that users enter here becomes a part of their public profiles on GFC-enabled sites. This allows users to find other members with similar interests and a new private messaging feature allows them to get in touch with each other. This also gives site owners a better overview of what the interests of their visitors are.

Newsletters and Recommendations

This new poll is the central new feature as other new tools like the newsletters and personalized recommendations are linked to the answers. Site owners, for example, can now send opt-in newsletters to a very specific group of their members - advanced Fender Stratocaster-playing Beatles fans, for example.

The answers in this poll also influence the kind of content recommendations that a user sees in the new Friend Connect content recommendation gadget. Even users who aren't members of the site will profit from this as the gadget will display recommendations based on the aggregate data Google has collected from all of the site's members.

In addition to all of these new tools, site owners can also use the new GFC export tools and APIs to link all of this data to third-party tools.

Link to AdSense

Site owners can now choose to link some of the ads on their sites directly to answers that users have made public in the 'Interests' section. Site owners can link existing ads on their sites to these or create new ones right from the AdSense section of their Friend Connect accounts. This allows Google to display more personally relevant ads that match the interests of a site's users.

Sadly, it doesn't look like Google implemented any advanced authentication mechanisms like OAuth for the Twitter integration (Update: apparently this is Twitter's own fault for not supporting OAuth yet, though they promise to enable this feature in the next major release).

As Biz Stone points out on the Twitter blog, this might indeed become an interesting way to find your Twitter friends on other sites. For now, however, Friend Connect is not implemented widely enough for it to have any real effect yet.

Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect

Google is clearly locked in a battle with Facebook Connect, and thanks to this Twitter integration, Friend Connect now feels a bit more like Facebook Connect, as your actual friends are shown separately from the other members of the site.

This Twitter integration will surely sway a few site owners to implement Friend Connect over Facebook Connect, but it will surely take a month or two before we can see which service is taking the lead.

But it gave me that same sinking feeling that my parents probably had when they went VCR shopping for the first time and the salesperson said, "So - Beta or VHS?"

Just so long as it doesn't leave our blogs and web apps like those parties where you have two circles of friends eying each other warily from across the buffet table. Can we all get along?

More Noise to Signal

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.

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.