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Website
owners can make any site social
Google Friend Connect Preview Announced
On
May 12, at Campfire One at the Googleple,
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced a preview release of
Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow
traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social
features for its visitors.
Websites
that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and
now they can be, easily. With Google
Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to
his or her site and get social features up and running immediately
without programming -- picking
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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.
To
illustrate, 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 website (www.ingridmichaelson.com).
As a result, starting tonight, 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 website. 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 websites."
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.
"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."
For
Site Owners: Traffic and User Engagement
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 websites.
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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.
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Increase
engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides
more interesting content and richer social experiences.
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Less
work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming
team or becoming a social network.
[Source:
Google]
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