It has been quite the day for connecting. Not only did Facebook unleash Facebook Connect on the world, but Google has also now made Google Friend Connect available (in beta) as well.
Friend Connect is basically a way to make your own site more social via a service from Google. By using the service, you are allowing people to socialize within your site using accounts they have already established from other parties (including Google itself).
Friend Connect was first launched back in May as a preview release, but Google has been working a lot on it since then, and has expanded features “with richer, more integrated profiles and new ways to discuss and share content, like including YouTube videos in your comments.”
“Friend Connect’s goal is to facilitate an open social web,” says Product Manager Mussie Shore. “Using open standards like OpenID and OAuth, Friend Connect makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit. Additionally, websites that use Friend Connect become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community.”
The best part about it is probably that it requires no developer knowledge. They give you a little bit of code to embed and that’s pretty much all there is to it.
