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May 12, 2008
Google's Friend Connect: Add Social Networking to Your Site
If you've wanted to ride the social media marketing wave by adding social features to your website, but the economy has you worried about spending lots of money on apps, then get excited. Google is again coming to the rescue by offering a free service for you to get your social media game on.
After Google's Campfire One event tonight, website owners will be able to utilize Friend Connect (http://www.google.com/friendconnect). Basically, it's social applications for the coding-challenged. Visitors to sites using 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."
David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google had this to say: "Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social. Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there's 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."
What do you think about Friend Connect? Plan to add it to your site? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.
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Posted by Nathania Johnson on May 12, 2008 12:08 PM
Comments
Sachendra May 14, 2008 2:12 AM
I was very interested in getting Google Friends Connect for my site, as it's a new site, which has a need for people sharing information, eg. photoes, new news etc. However I applied for Google Friend Connect a few times and didn't get a response. After reading up a bit I found two others: MySpace's Data Availability and Facebook Connect. Which both have very interesting social abilities.
I guess the one that will succeed the most will be the one that will allow the most websites to sign up the fastest.. at the moment they seem a bit too selective??
Lindsay August 17, 2008 10:24 PM
It's a great tool to have followers on your site
takenphotos March 3, 2009 7:50 PM
Fantastic!! I'm going to be experimenting over the next few weeks and this may have solved all the questions!
SEO Cumbria March 21, 2009 2:12 PM
I have been working on my website for months. It is plain and I have not made any money yet, but I'm hopeful. Maybe this is a way to draw some traffic to my site which is a affiliate shop. It's worth a try and I will learn something new!
Maria Thomas May 20, 2009 10:21 AM
I remember back in the portal days, there were services that allowed you to add portal tools like calendar, chat etc to your own website,
and if I remember correctly it didn't become a rave.
This kinda seems similar. Or am I missing something?
Note that I'm talking about the "concept" of doing what you could do on a big website for your niche audience on your own site.