Google Friend Connect
by Volker Weber
Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.
Looks pretty lame so far, but the architecture is promising since you can login with a number of existing accounts including OpenID. Anybody remember the product manager?
Comments
Call me an old fart if you want, but I think I’m suffering “social web” fatigue. This Web 2.0 stuff is all well and good, but I say there’s nothing like socialising in “real life”—something I am sure vowe can sympathise with given his (no doubt raucous) recent Saturday night :o)
Ben, but don't you think that the social web can actually help you organize your real-life socializing? By keeping up-to-date with friends (e.g. twittering, IM, reading their blog, whichever) you know what they're up to and often also where they are (going to be). So it may happen, that you find out by chance, that you'll be close by and there may be an opportunity for an easy real-life meeting with a friend otherwise located far away. Has happened to me...
Ragnar, it most certainly can. Don’t get me wrong, I use a lot of these tools. But they supplement “real life”, they don’t make up for it. I just worry sometimes that people become too reliant on these things in favour of real-world interaction. The perceived anonymity of the web doesn’t do much for building communities in the real world.
Already in the UK we see people who have hundreds of friends on Facebook or whatever, yet don’t know what their neighbour looks like.
