Google previews Friend Connect
Published: 13 May 2008 16:53 BST
Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a website without programming.
David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect as plumbing for the rest of the web. Website owners will be able to use the hosted application to allow interactions with visitors from social-networking sites such as Facebook and Orkut, by copying and pasting snippets of code into their site.
"The web is getting better by getting more social. We've baked social features into the infrastructure of the web and it is not tied to any particular site," Glazer said. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on web and with any app."
Demonstrations of Google's Friend Connect service seemed to be generally well received on Monday night during the company's third Campfire One event at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. At previous such events, debuts have included two other significant, developer-orientated software technologies, OpenSocial and App Engine.
Programme manager Mussie Shore gave the central demonstration, sprucing up a guacamole lovers' site with the ability to let users join as members, comment, post photos, rate recipes and spread word of those activities to contacts on existing social-networking sites LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut or hi5.
Google Friend Connect employs several more or less standard networking technologies: OpenSocial as a foundation for richer web applications; OpenID to handle login chores; and OAuth to let users approve the grafting of new branches onto their existing social networks, such as Facebook. It's yet another option in the complicated and fast-changing set of alliances and standards efforts in the social-networking domain.
Attendees at Campfire One generally waxed positive about Friend Connect. Don MacAskill, chief executive of photo-sharing site SmugMug, said he'd be interested in trying out the offering.
In his demo, Shore picked some social applications from an online catalogue; tweaked minor parameters, such as background colour; clicked a button to generate a few lines of JavaScript; copied it into his web page; and exercised the new features on the revamped website.
Credit: Friend Connect gets a warm reception at Google Campfire One from CNET News.com
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