Google helps your website go social
Google has joined the revolution to make the web more social by introducing Friend Connect to enable people to interact with their friends.
Friend Connect follows just after announcements last week by social networking sites Facebook and MySpace to open up their data availability to be used on personal websites.
Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other websites.
Google says with Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running right away without any complicated programming. This will run the complete range from invitations to member’s gallery and from message walls to reviews.
As 99% of sites are not currently socially enabled, Friend Connect has a big potential market in front of it and the route to all things profitable in this space will be through tapping into “the deep profit and user data flowing through Friend Connect.” In other words, mining that information through advertising.
Google is being cautious about approving sites to use the new code and is creating a waiting list for requests to use Friend Connect. It says it expects to give the go ahead to a few dozens sites in the next few days.
Meanwhile MySpace and Facebook anticipate rolling out their offerings over the next few weeks.
Tags: facebook, friend connect, myspace, Social Networking