Google launches ‘Friend Connect’

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social, but there are many barriers to offering social applications. Google Friend Connect changes this by enabling any site to add social features. Here’s how it works. Google Friend Connect presents a catalogue of social ‘gadgets’, and you simply copy code snippets for these gadgets and paste them into your site.

Google Friend Connect provides a core set of social tools such as; member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing. The key tool is the members’ gadget - this provides core social features for the visitors, such as:

• Signing-in with existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID accounts
• Inviting and showing activity to existing friends from other social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more
• Browsing member profiles and connecting with new friends across other social networks

Google Friend Connect integrates with contact lists from social networks meaning users who join your site are instantly connected with friends who are already members, and can invite friends from other networks. They can opt in to broadcasting their activities to friends in their social networks - a post to your message board, for example, can instantly be visible to people in multiple social networks. These instant networks, combined with the wealth of other gadgets, can form potent new online communities, very quickly, and very easily.

Everyone wins in a friend connected web:

For the site owner - Google Friend Connect gives that equips the site with social features, including the ability to run third-party social applications. Moreover, it enables visitors to log-in with existing credentials, see who among their friends are already registered, and also give them one-click access to invite friends from other networking sites.

For the site's visitors - Visitors no longer need to create a new account or develop yet another friends list just to use the social applications on a site. Google have created the infrastructure that allows one login to be used across multiple sites and the ability to reuse existing friend relationships that the visitor has already established elsewhere.

OpenSocial developers - With Google Friend Connect, we can develop applications for any website which can now run on other social networking sites, and anywhere else on the web that uses Google Friend Connect.

Social networks - With Google Friend Connect, social networks thrive as hubs of activity while giving their users more opportunities to bring their friend relationships to other websites while simultaneously bringing their friends and activities from outside the social network back in. People now have the ability to publish their activities across the web into the activity streams of their social networks.