Google Friend Connect Service - No More Traffic Excuses

Google now has a social networking service for web site owners. It is still in beta, but web site owners can already register for notification on the preview release. With this option no web site owner can anymore complain about the cost or complexity in setting up social networking options on a web site or blog. Google states that this service will enable web site owners to:

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

You can see the service offering at: http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/moreinfo

Here’s how Google explains this new service (currently in pre-release “Beta” at press time).
“Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social. But the barriers to offering social applications on the site have been considerable. Google Friend Connect changes this by enabling any site to offer dozens of social gadgets created by Google and OpenSocial developers to their visitors. This means more visitors spending more time on a more engaging website — with absolutely no programming required to make it happen.”

So if you want to create a social aspect to your site or blog, Google will make it very easy and free for you to add this functionality. Literally you will just copy and paste some code and your site gets socially enabled. You can then modify the various widgets and options of the social aspects of your site right through your web browser.

The Friend Connect administration site presents a catalog of social gadgets provided by Google and other developers. You choose gadgets based on your site’s needs. Simply copy code snippets for these gadgets and paste them as desired into your site.

Social gadgets created by Google. Google Friend Connect provides a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing. The key gadget is the members gadget. This gadget provides core social features for your visitors:

• sign-in with their existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account
• invite and show activity to existing friends from social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more
• browse member profiles across social networks
• connect with new friends on your site

Social gadgets created by other developers. For the past year, the developer community has been creating hundreds of applications for OpenSocial, an open standard for social applications. Once you have added Friend Connect to your site, you can offer many of these applications to your users, simply by pasting the relevant snippet into your site.

Thumbs up to Google on this offering. I totally love it