Go Social with Your Site: Google Announces Friend Connect
On May 12, 2008 Google announced a preview release of a new free service, Friend Connect, that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.
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 — Without requiring coding experience!
“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 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.”
- 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.
If you’d like to read Google’s press release, here it is:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20080512_friend_connect.html
For more information, example (beta) sites, and to sign up for a preview release:
http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/intro
We have signed up for a preview release and are awaiting Google’s invitation. We’ll let you know when we get to start using it on this site so that you can see it in action here.