Google Friend Connect Hits The Streets
A few months back, Google announced that they would be releasing a product that would allow easy integration of Social Networking features within websites and Blogs.
As of 4th December the Beta release of FriendConnect has been unveiled – and Google are accepting signups (to go on a wait-List i believe) for a phased roll out of the product.
What is FriendConnect?
Using OpenID, FriendConnect will allow you to add a range of social interactivity tools onto your website, in just the same way that you ad Adsense or analytics code. This will allow people to sign-up as Members of your site, post messages, reviews and ratings plus expected features such as sharing of apps, videos and pictures.
Benefits and How-To:
Members wil also be able to invite others to join, so the potential for spreading the word about your site is obvious. There may also be tools to allow easy communication between Friend Connect and other social apps such as Facebook and Hi5.
As with other Google tools, you will need to sign up under your Google account and apply to join the program, but after that it seems that adding the Social features to your site really will be just the same as adsense – i.e. generating and pasting the required code into your site/template.
FriendConnect will of course be competing against a number of established players, but I’d be very surprised if they don’t grab a large chunk of the market with this – and they will almost certainly be adding a host of media and application type features into it.
It certainly opens up new possiblilities for smaller sites and new developers who would like to integrate social/membership type features into their sites.
Here’s a handy little video about Google Friend Connect (from CampFire one):
Of course, Facebook have also launched a Friend Connect tool so let battle commence 
See more at: http://www.google.com/friendconnect
