Google Friend Connect is now integrated with one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks, Netlog. Netlog, which has more than 45 million users worldwide, just implemented Google’s alternative to Facebook Connect, which allows users to sign in using any ID supported by Google Friend Connect (including Google, Yahoo, AIM, and OpenID) and share their activities with their existing contacts.
Google’s integration with Netlog lets users sign into sites and blogs using Friend Connect with their Netlog ID and password. Users can use their Netlog profiles on the site, invite other Netlog users to join Friend Connect, and also share their Friend Connect activity with friends on Netlog. On the back end, Google uses standards like OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial technologies to enable Netlog and other social networks and sites to plug into Friend Connect.
Netlog is growing fast, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle-East, where it serves as the community portal of choice thanks to its viral nature and extensive language translation program. But even though Netlog is becoming increasingly popular in other parts of the world, this isn’t as big of a win for Google as the integration of a popular social network worldwide like Facebook, which officially has 200 million registered users around the globe (250 to 280 million unofficially). And Facebook just hit 307 million unique visitors worldwide in April, with MySpace trailing behind with 127 million unique visitors in April, according to comScore. By comparison, comScore’s worldwide unique visitor estimate for Netlog is 23.8 million.
I would rather use Facebook. Google has a habit of autolinking and locking everything. If I sign into a youtube account that is different than my gmail it will sign me out of gmail which is annoying if I have a bunch of docs. If I use their service and sign out of one site will it sign me out of my gmail and other sites too? Sorry I just don’t trust google to not annoy the hell out of me..
Just link your youtube and Gmail accounts.
Right now, I saw 6 stories about Google on techcrunch. How much TC get from Google?
Google friends connect is going good.
We just adopted GFC on Cogenuity and I must say that the end user experience is pretty good. The developer experience was easy to integrate and roll out. There was only one technical gotcha when using IE which isn’t too bad consider how new the technology is.
We also integrated with Facebook Connect at the same time. One thing that GFC does that FC does not is the selection of multiple vendors to authenticate with. An interesting side affect that we discovered was that if you signed in to google today and yahoo tomorrow and AIM after that, then google considers all three of those accounts to be linked together. They will show up on your friends list within google.
i would be very happy if you aspect to be my friend and we can help each other
Is there a very 3rd party that combines GFC and FC features as well?
Thx
Solofo