Google made Friend Connect available in beta today for any website to use. Previously it was only available in a limited preview release, and I was excited to be included in that. You can see the Friend Connect Member gadget and Friend Connect Wall gadget on the right sidebar of this blog.
TechCrunch has an insightful post about Friend Connect’s capabilities to make your site more social.
“Since it is based on OpenID, visitors to a Website that adds Friend Connect code will be able to sign in using their Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID usernames and passwords. The Websites will also be able to add any OpenSocial apps developed by third parties.”
These OpenSocial apps have access to the user’s friends lists, profile information, feed messages and more.
They also call it Google’s answer to FaceBook Connect, and it’s interesting that both of them announced availability the same day.
But one of the commenters on the TechCrunch post had some deeper insight into the significance of Friend Connect:
“FriendConnect provides the “Open Stack in a box” to the long-tail of the web–under the hood, it lets any site instantly become an OpenID relying party, an OAuth consumer, and an OpenSocial container (meaning they can also now add any 3rd-party OpenSocial gadgets).
This will, I believe, have a dramatic impact on the rate at which these open building blocks gain widespread adoption, and ironically it will let the smaller sites leapfrog the larger sites in terms of technical capabilities, because Google is essentially hosting and proxying all of the work needed to support the Open Stack…”
“… there’s a lot more to FriendConnect than “OpenSocial’s answer to Facebook”, and anyone who’s a fan of OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, etc., this is definitely something to cheer.”
So I think what he’s saying is that Friend Connect allows any site that supports it to participate in single sign-on, and extend its capabilities as more OpenSocial gadgets become available. It will certainly be interesting to see the apps that get developed and shared across websites and blogs in this way.
Here’s a link to the Google blog post announcing availability of Friend Connect.
If you want to experiment with Friend Connect, here’s How To Install Friend Connect On Your WordPress Blog.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Don, Thanks for your post about Google Friend Connect. I am downloading it now. It sounds like a great idea.
Do you have thoughts of when to choose Google Friend Connect vs. facebook Connect? My initial thought is Google has a broader audience where as facebook is more contained.
I am also off to checkout the top 10 Gmail tips.
I like this blog post titled: Google Friend Connect Needs OpenSocial Gadgets.
@Jim – thanks for your comment. I think your analysis is right – its seems like Google will have a broader audience, but they need to come up with more compelling gadgets that leverage Friend Connect.
I’ve heard that Facebook Connect is difficult to set up and install on a site, which might limit the usage of that until they straighten it out.
I have added this to my site and am interested in seeing the “social” effect. Doesn’t it seem to be kind of leaching off of social network sites? The only thing I wish was a available was more social networking sites than are actually there. In making the decision between myspace, facebook, and google in the social networking integrated platform I think it’s Google’s reputation and personal confidence in Google that made me go with them. I am supposing in time that they will offer more options.