Google aims to make web sites more social and connect friends

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 13 May 2008 16:27

Business IT - Networking

All web publishers want more traffic to their site and Google aims to make that happen by giving them a tool that enable them to easily add social networking features without complicated coding and development. The new tool, called Google Friend Connect, is now in limited beta release and queues are starting to build from interested web site owners looking to get on the waiting list.

Google today announced a preview release of Google Friend Connect in an interesting video preview at Campfire One at the Silicon Valley Googleplex. The preview featured a range of prominent website owners and developers. Google Friend Connect allows a website owner to 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 authorisation APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, LinkedIn and others.

In the video demo, the web developer who maintains the site for independent musician Ingrid Michaelson showed how she added social networking features to her offical website www.ingridmichaelson.com from music social networking site iLike using Google Friend Connect. As a result, fans who visit the 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, at the musician's website.

"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 websites."

According to Google, Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website 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. CONTINUED