12 January, 2009
Google Friend Connect
Posted by Ben Rowland in Web technology, Cool!,
Google Friend Connect is a new service that allows anyone with a website to instantly add social networking features to their existing website without writing any code. The service is in beta and is now available to everyone. Google has a
blog announcement regarding this service.
Tecture has developed a number of fairly sophisticated custom social networking sites for clients, and given what I know about such sites, this sounded too good to be true. So I gave it a shot.
Like most Google products, it is insanely simple to set up. In five minutes, I added a members gadget and a review/rate gadget to Tecture's blog page. To the right, you'll see the members gadget. It provides "sign in" and "join" features, and it displays a list of site members. Below this post, you'll see the ratings gadget, where members can rate or review something — in this case, my blog post.
Visitors to Tecture's blog are now greeted with a "Join" button, which pops open a Google Accounts popup window, prompting the visitor to sign in with their existing account or create a new account. In my case, I simply used my browland@gmail.com account. If a visitor already has an account on Google, Yahoo!, AIM, or OpenID, they can sign in with those accounts. (I also tried this with my AIM account and experienced some flakiness, but eventually got it to work.) Next, a first-time Google Friend Connect user needs to set up their Google Friend Connect profile by selecting a photo, adding links, and providing basic "about me" information. Once done, the visitor clicks the "Join this site" button. At this point, the popup closes, and the members gadget on Tecture's blog refreshes, with the visitors profile photo added to the members gadget. The ratings gadget is also now activated (as I choose not to allow anonymous ratings).
Google doesn't offer much more beyond these basic gadgets, but promises more to come. A basic "wall" gadget is available, as is a minimal "sign in" gadget.
Enabling this functionality on your website is easy. Webmasters must upload two HTML files to their web server to enable the service, and can then generate HTML snippets for the gadgets they would like to add. Google makes this step as easy as the Google AdSense service, allowing webmasters to configure gadget sizes and color schemes before generating the HTML. Finally, just copy and paste into your site and off you go.