The Expand2Web Blog

I’ve been experimenting with Friend Connect for about 4 days now on my blog. So far I’ve made a lot of new friends, and had 13 new people become “members” of my site without having to implement any special membership system. Many of them have left comments too.

This is emerging as an additional way to engage in conversations around a web site or topic. Kind of like how email is used differently than the telephone, IM is used differently than email, or Twitter is helpful for different things than a blog .

Marc Andreessen has a particularly good explanation of Friend Connect, and how his company Ning plans to implement it to let their users take their “social context” with them. This paragraph is a nice summary of how Friend Connect works:

In a sense, Friend Connect one-ups Flash widgets. Many social networks and other content hubs today publish Flash widgets like video players and music players that get embedded in pages all over the web. Friend Connect is a mechanism that provides the embedding capability for Open Social gadgets to be used all throughout the web — with the added benefit that with a Friend Connect-enabled Open Social gadget, the user gets her social context anywhere she goes, which isn’t the case with a typical Flash widget.

If you’re not familiar with Open Social, its a set of APIs from Google that allow developers to build apps that can leverage your information across many social networks. Here’s a link to some more information about it.

Anyway, please join in the fun over on the right hand side of this page, and leave a comment to let me know what you think about Friend Connect, ok? I’d love to hear your impressions.

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