Google has rolled out a new recommendations gadget that allows sites that use Google Friend Connect to see which parts of their websites their visitors like best.
Publishers can create the gadget on Google Friend Connect’s site and then embed the code into their sites. Once the gadget is embedded, members can then recommend the content they like, anything from a whole page to a single photo by clicking a “recommend it” button that accompanies any piece of content on the site. It’s useful for both publishers and visitors, because they can easily see what parts of a site are the most popular. The items with the most votes will rise to the top of the list within the gadget, making it easier for others to find those features even if they are buried deep within a site. Website owners can also see which members have recommended a given item and learn more about them.
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.
To compete with Facebook Connect, Google has been steadily adding useful features to ramp up its Friend Connect product, including comment translation, a Social Bar, and integration with Google’s weblog publishing service Blogger.
Here’s a video showing how the gadget works:
This sounds pretty useful.. is this the first step to launch or test it’s very own recommendation service?
Well absolutely!! any which way social features filtered and refreshed..
they really try to create their social network once again…. what’s the next move … be able to see live comment and then status… sounds like too much layer on a website….
Seems like the next step might be to use this as a basis for affiliate networks.
There are other very interesting options for that module:
When you click on “get the code” at Google friend connect site , you will find out that it has two parts:
One for the button and one for the “feed” (the one with user’s recommendations.)
The nice part is that you can put the feed in ANY other site your or not…., Meaning for example that if you have 10 stories sites, you can paste a feed of each one to your 11th site… OR: use one site to paste feeds of all your communities sites…Or: exchange feeds with your friends and so on.
Technically to allow that you simple go to Google friend connect page, choose the site you would like to work on, click on site settings, choose the advanced tab and then add to the bottom text box, the sites you would like to allow google to use and show results at. One for a line.
I didn’t count the benefits , ( too much English for me) but obviously it’s a brilliant widget with a brilliant concept, in my opinion. Nice job Google!
GFC is a really interesting approach towards adoption where they offer technology for publishers of different and varying levels of technical ability. They have widgets which is just some boilerplate markup that you drop on your page. They have a javascript library for web masters with some scripting skills. They also have libraries and a full REST API for your server side developers. That, and the initial out-of-the-box end user experience handles all of the major players except for facebook.
I have run in to one gotcha with GFC. I can’t seem to get the javascript library to work with any version of IE. Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all work fine. Has anyone else run into this?
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.