Google Announces Preview Release of Google Friend Connect
IT News Online Staff
2008-05-13
Google Inc. has announced a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps Web site owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the Web to easily provide social features for its visitors.
With Google Friend Connect any Web site owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Visitors to any site using Google 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.
Independent musician Ingrid Michaelson has added music features from iLike with Google Friend Connect and is now able to run the iLike OpenSocial application on her official Web site (www.ingridmichaelson.com). As a result, fans who visit Ingrid's site can connect with their friends without having to leave the site. Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles, see who is attending concerts, and enjoy other features of the iLike application, all at Ingrid's Web site. With Google Friend Connect, people will be able to enjoy their favorite features with their friends on any Website across the Web.
"We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us," said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. "Friend Connect is a significant opportunity for iLike, artists, and fans. The iLike Artist Dashboard will be the first content-management system that allows artists not only to post their songs, concerts, and videos to every leading social network from one dashboard, but also to simultaneously manage the content on their own Web sites."
Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the Web. First, many Web site owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the Web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.
"Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. "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."
Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their Web sites:
- Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
- Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
- Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.
All site owners interested in learning more about Google Friend Connect and signing up for the wait list can visit www.google.com/friendconnect/. In the weeks ahead Google said it will be turning on more sites, adding more social applications and integrating feedback from site owners and developers.
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