Google Launches Friend Connect After Months of Waiting

By Chris Crum - Thu, 12/04/2008 - 20:00

Still in Beta Of Course

It has been quite the day for connecting. Not only did Facebook unleash Facebook Connect on the world, but Google has also now made Google Friend Connect available (in beta) as well.

Friend Connect is basically a way to make your own site more social via a service from Google. By using the service, you are allowing people to socialize within your site using accounts they have already established from other parties (including Google itself).

Google Friend Connect
Friend Connect was first launched back in May as a preview release, but Google has been working a lot on it since then, and has expanded features "with richer, more integrated profiles and new ways to discuss and share content, like including YouTube videos in your comments."

"Friend Connect's goal is to facilitate an open social web," says Product Manager Mussie Shore. "Using open standards like OpenID and OAuth, Friend Connect makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit. Additionally, websites that use Friend Connect become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community."

The best part about it is probably that it requires no developer knowledge. They give you a little bit of code to embed and that's pretty much all there is to it.

>>> Visit Google Friend Connect ...

News Tags: Social Media, Google, Google Friend Connect

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003.

6 Comments

By goheels (WPN reader) - Sun, 02/08/2009 - 12:16

Not that friendly

Google Friends Connect is a work in progress. Good Idea and eventually it will be a good thing but I find it very hard to get the two required files to upload to the site. I did get one site to work and when sending invites to people to join the url is not clickable and in order for them to join they would have to cut and paste the url. NOT! so I have not sent invites until that is fixed. On the other issue maybe they don't let you do but one site???? What is suppose to be easy and friendly is a joke. Only gurus will be able to get it to work.

By لحظة وداع (WPN reader) - Wed, 12/31/2008 - 06:44

thanks for post

By kennel cough (WPN reader) - Mon, 12/08/2008 - 04:56

something unusual here

Well something not new here.This is the same feature I saw on Mybloglog.I am surprised by how long it takes to get Google to finally publish this feature considering the huge marketing appeal it attracts.Well good luck here for Google.

By Matthieu Catillon (WPN reader) - Fri, 12/05/2008 - 12:50

Against publishers interest ?

Could it be a threat to the publishers' forums? If users can interact and communicate through other means then the forums could collapse... users would not use them to communicate / socialize anymore. They would not contribute anymore. That would mean failure for G Connect, Facebook Connect and any Connect like service. The only way for these "Connect products" to succeed would be that the potential trafic acquisition (users' friends not familiar with the website) offset the reduced trafic in the forums... Matt

By Matthieu Catillon (WPN reader) - Mon, 12/15/2008 - 13:25

Against publishers' interest ?

By Chris Crum - Fri, 12/05/2008 - 13:05

RE: Against publishers interest?

Not a bad point. Of course, not all sites have forums or other means of socializing, so I would expect this would be more appealing to them, as it could cut into their own forum use.

Still, I think the branding potential of Google Friend Connect (or Facebook Connect for that matter) could be an attractive element to publishers looking to get their brands spread more into other popular communities.