Google brings Social Networks to small Websites
May 13th, 2008 | by Jose Miguel Cansado |Google presented yesterday Google Friend Connect. This new product enables to any Website to add Social Networking features. The video below is quite illustrative:
By simply copy and paste of code, any webmaster of a small website can add social capabilities to his site. In the video you see the example of Love Da Guacamole site. By adding a few gadgets from Google Friend Connect, the Love Da Guacamole site users can leave comments and ratings, share pictures and invite friends, all using their Google identity (or any other from Open Social sites, as Yahoo) and adding friends from their preferred social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc)
While MySpace and Facebook provide APIs aiming at enriching their existing profiles, Google is providing easy tools for small and medium websites to benefit from Social Networks and drive more traffic to them. Many small & medium websites use Google AdSense to manage their advertisement. Therefore the more traffic these tools drive, the more ads that Google will place in these sites. It is a win-win. Google wins, the small website win too. Hundreds of thousands of sites will be able to enjoy the viral benefits of Social Networks with Google Friend Connect. Once more, thanks Google!
Note: Not so fast… Google Friend Connect is only pre-released. You will have to wait a little more to put it in your site, unless you are one of the few white-listed developers.
