You may have seen the news today that Google Friend Connect is now available to all sites. The official announcement over at Google describes the details:
We’re pleased to share that Google Friend Connect is now available in beta to any webmaster looking to add a ‘dash of social’ to his or her site. This service lets webmasters add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code — no advanced coding or technical background required.
We know that people want to be social on the web, and Friend Connect makes it easy for anyone to sign in to a website, share a little bit about themselves through a personal profile, discover other people with similar interests, invite their contacts, and interact with friends. Even better, you don’t have to deal with the hassle of creating yet another username and password — Friend Connect lets you log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID. Similarly, you can choose to either establish a new profile or use profiles and friend sources from other social networks that have opened up their services, like Plaxo and orkut.
We’re thrilled to be a part of this ambitious project, and we think this is great for Plaxo members. Now, you can visit any Google Friend Connect enabled site and in just a few clicks be signed up, signed in, with your Plaxo profile photo, and access to your friends. And if you elect to “Share your activities on this site to other users and friends,” your activity stream from that site will get shared back into Plaxo.
We are in the early phases of a major transformation of the Web, leaving behind the “walled garden” era of social networking, and looking forward to the arrival of the Social Web. Our goal is to make Plaxo a service that is useful to you all over the Social Web, and today we just took an important step forward on that pathway.
For a bit more context and some screenshots, check out my post on TheRealMcCrea, that puts this in the context of other news of the day. Also see Joseph Smarr’s original post on this integration, when we first announced it in June.
John McCrea
vp of marketing
