Google Friend Connect - initial thoughts

Google Friend Connect is a way for sites/blogs to go social without having to build registration process, user authentication, maintain users profile data and their social connections. It basically gives you these functionalities in a gadget that you can paste on your website. I am not going to spend time on how to set it up and all, its really child's play, what I am going to talk about is my initial feelings about it and what I feel it holds for us in future.

Google Friend Connect has a lot of obvious advantages. It allows people to invite their friends over to your site and allows people to maintain their profile and add friends all from within a small gadget. This obviously gives your site a slight viral functionality as people can invite more people to join your site. This also means the visitors of your site can view your site's members, their profiles and their friends' profiles, which are again engaging social features, but lets face, it this might get a few extra eye balls to your site but is definitely not going to make your site a social sex bomb.

Lets go a few steps back, why are you interested in friend connect? I take it that you want to socialize your site's content which would probably be a way to get more attention or to explore new channels for your content's distribution. Either ways you want your content to go out and reach its target audience. Thats where friend connect is bigger than just those few gadgets that are available right now. Since it is built on the Open Social platform, everything that your sites' members (people joined into the friend connect gadget of your site) do on your site can be basically called an open social activity. This means that if I join tempostand as a member and write/post a review on song, it can be sent as an activity feed to my orkut account. So all my friends on orkut will see that update in their friends' updates list. Thereby pushing my activity (my review on a song on tempostand) to my friends on orkut and thus getting across to more people than just those who are joined to your site via Friend Connect.

I think with Friend Connect's launch, we will see more generic gadgets being developed that can be used across all sorts of sites/blogs. One such simple gadget that Id love to see is one that is able to push excerpts of my comments/reviews/ratings etc that I do on a site, to my twitter stream. So that I tweet everything I do on any site, but this should come with functionality to turn it off, we don't want another beacon now do we?