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Google wants to give a helping
hand to all site owners who face traffic challenges, and the best way to do
that is by giving the site a little makeover and offering social features to
any visitor through Google Friend Connect. From now on, no matter how social or
not social the site is, Google’s new service will provide easy to set up social
features that will enable visitors to make new friends or stay in touch with
old ones, including from social networking sites like Facebook, hi5 and even
Google Talk.
“Google Friend Connect is about
helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social,” said David Glazer,
director of engineering at Google. “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t
necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting
their visitors interact with each other.”
Site owners will find it easy to
benefit from the social features offered by Friend Connect without any
programming skills, and at the same time, users won’t have to recreate their
friends list over and over again.
“Fortunately, there’s an
emerging wave of social standards – OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data
access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others,’ Glazer also
said. “Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily
connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any
site, any friends’ a reality.”
Friend Connect is all about interaction between users, and according to its developers, website owners can add a
snippet of code to the site, and the social features are ready to run. They will
also be able to choose from built-in functionality like user registration,
invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third
party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Site owners can learn more about
Google Friend Connect and sign up for the wait list at http://www.google.com/friendconnect/.
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