Get Social with Google Friend Connect

Walled Gardens

You are probably a light user of a social networking site, whether you know it or not.  MySpace, Facebook, Twitter are all examples of this type of site.  Some of these types of sites are also called walled gardens. In this case, a walled garden is a social site that lets you use all of its profiling and networking features, often for free, but will not let you ‘share’ any of the data you generate on the site with other social sites.

A good example of a walled garden site is Facebook.  Up until recently, anything you did on Facebook, like filling out surveys or making new friends, stayed on Facebook.  If you got tired of the service, found something new, or just want to back up the information you may have spent hours putting together, you couldn’t.

Social Network Connections

However, in the past few months there has been a big push toward finding ways for these types of sites (often called social media sites) to start working together.  There are a number of clear benefits for this to happen:

• Single sign-on: If you have an established profile with a site, you can use that logon on a different site that ‘trusts’ the site you signed up with.
• Reduce redundancy: You can spend a couple of hours putting together your profile, friend links, links to favorite sites, etc.  These things are called your social graph.  By having a network of trusted sites, you potentially only have to enter all of this information once.
• Increased exposure for new social networks: New sites offering a new feature or tool quickly becomes exposed through your network of friends.  If someone tries the service and likes it, they can ‘flag’ the new site as beneficial, and that advice will be communicated through the network.
• More direct control over the information you present: By giving YOU the ability to choose where you profile is exposed, and how it is exposed, gives you more control of how you present yourself. A single social site may only allow you to control this information a certain way.  However, if that site isn’t the only one requesting that information, they no longer have the final say how it is presented.

Google Friend Connect

Toward this goal, Google has their own entry, called Friend Connect.  Google has had this utility in a closed beta for a while now, but recently has opened it up for anyone to try it out.

Google has a unique perspective in this space, since they didn’t originate as a single social network (although they have one in the form of Orkut).  Instead, they thought about how they could enable almost anyone who runs a blog to almost instantly make that blog ‘social network enabled.’  That’s where Friend Connect comes in.

Does everyone have to sign up for Friend Connect?  No. If you have a blog that you control directly (so WordPress.com and LiveJournal are a no go for now, we’ll see about Blogger as it is owned by Google too), then you can go ahead and sign up and follow the simple instructions.  However, if you simply are a user of social networks and Google products, you don’t have to do anything except visit a blog that already has Friend Connect installed.

When you do, you will find a small Friend Connect widget (a small information box) that will offer to let you add the site you are on to your list of favorite sites using your Google login.  You can also find other people using Friend Connect and indicate that they are friends of yours.

That’s it, in a nutshell.  Simple, but a very powerful concept.

More In Store

Of course, if that was all there was too Friend Connect, it would be pretty boring.  To Google, Friend Connect is a platform. That is to say, new applications can be built on Friend Connect and sites participating in the program can pick and choose between which apps they want to use.  Google has already developed a couple of Friend Connect-aware apps, called Wall and Feedback.

Wall is a small app that lets you leave messages and links to YouTube videos (another Google property) on a site.  Other folks can reply to your message.  Also, those messages go in to your social graph, so you can see where you’ve left messages later.

Feedback is fairly self-explanatory.  It will show up at the end of articles or on web sites that want you to leave feedback on the site’s presentation or quality of its articles, etc.  This widget also leverages the power of Friend Connect to show where you have left feedback, and when.

More applications are in development.  And knowing Google, an open framework will be revealed that will allow anyone to develop new ways of leveraging the power of Friend Connect across all participating sites.

More Information

Google has helpfully provided a new help site to answer any question might have on Friend Connect.  It can be found here.