Google has integrated Friend Connect with its weblog publishing service Blogger. Essentially, this enables people to start following (i.e. subscribing to) blogs using their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID accounts and turns Blogger more into a social network than a straightforward blog publishing service.
Blogs that you follow will be listed in your Blogger profile and the integration will also leverage existing relationships, meaning you’ll be able to quickly see if your friends are also following those blogs.
The integration was announced on Google’s new Social Web Blog, and the post promises more goodies in the future:
And this is just the first step in the integration, so be sure to stay tuned for further improvements, including an easy way to add OpenSocial gadgets through Blogger and the integration of the commenting features.
Here’s a video:
Just two weeks ago, Google introduced what it calls the Social Bar, a way for webmasters to include a small strip on top of their web pages and to enable them to add links for drop-down gadgets that lets visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, etc.
Google Friend Connect, which is the company’s own data portability effort, was opened up for all websites in the beginning of December 2008, right when Facebook made Facebook Connect generally available as well.
And thus, the battle for who will control access to your online identity continues. My guess is it’ll go on for a while before someone can be declared the winner, if at all.
is it worthwhile to integrate so many add in. Reliance should be more on content rather putting in so many features which is not of much use.
Is it content? or distribution? FriendConnect is a distribution tool.
Unfortunately, for most blogs, since a small percentage connect, the widget makes the blog look small – poorly read.
Overall, distribution is fragmented among RSS subscribers, friends at social networks, and bookmarks. FriendConnect adds to the fragmentation.
Fully agree. I was just trying to make a statement that Friend connect or for that matter Facebook connect make the blog space look so cramped up and instead of blog content attention gets drawn to the other peripheral tidbits around.
Fragmentation is a problem, for the UI, brand image for users, and page clutter. RSS, bookmark feeds, twitter, friendconnect, comments, user maps …
Anyone with a suggestion? Aside from deleting most of the widgets?
I’ve started with the drastic step to delete post comments – directing them to Twitter, Facebook, instead.
You guys realize that this just collects data about your browsing habits and all you’re doing is adding a name and a website to it for them right? I just don’t understand why people want to put their entire life on the internet. Personally I’ll stick to anonymous communities like http://f2bb.com
I just wrote about why I got rid of the sidebar widget, It’s completely useless:
http://hyveup.t...or-not-not.html
Well since I’ve added it I’ve got over 1700+ new users, so it works for me
I follow it.
I do not want to connect with either Google or Facebook because in essence they do not add value. What I want is to use OpenID and authenticate to all of them. THEN, I will consider their services.
Thanks,
GerardM
Friend Connect lets you login with any OpenID provider..
I added this widget on my personal blog at blogger but it doesn’t look good. I was also unable to change the location of this widget. Anyone else faced this issue?
If Blogger were a lady, i’d beat it with a leather belt! (oops.. did i say that out loud?)
I think SocialGo offers a lot more features and widgets than this… only because Ning is older its has more users.
I’ve covered SocialGo recently here…
http://web2craw...etwork-creator/
Opps…. wrong comment window…. sorry.. that above post was meant for the Ning news… cant we delete our own posts ?
Only available on Blogger? Not exactly ‘Open’.
At B. Ackles, I think it’s “open” to all blog platform, I’m not sure though!
If you want to place the recomendation gadget in your blogger.com blog, read this:
http://blog.lis...mmendation.html
its german, but easy to understand because of the pictures.