Earlier today, Portland’s Marshall Kirkpatrick had a post on the first Google Friend Connect widget observed outside of captivity, in its natural habitat:
Prominent Israeli tech blogger Orli Yakuel has just installed the first Google Friend Connect widget we’ve seen yet in the wild.
Read the post. Found it interesting. Filed it away.
Then, this evening, I’m reading through my feeds and what do I see? Portland-based Mapdango has added Google Friend Connect:
Friend Connect provides a simple, effective, and fairly universal way of adding social networking features to a web site. Although Friend Connect is still in private beta, mapdango is one of the lucky sites that now includes Friend Connect functionality (it took a little cajoling) 🙂
Now, that’s exciting!
So, what’s Google Friend Connect? Well, it’s a social-networking widget. The most readily available analogy I have is “the Yahoo! MyBlogLog widget on steroids.” Or, as Google says:
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.
Now granted, Google Friend Connect is not without its shortcomings—or its detractors. But let’s suspend disbelief for a brief moment, disregard that silly “privacy” thing, and revel in how cool it is to see a Portland company among the very fist to get the chance to test-drive this technology.
As always, I’m very interested to see where this goes.
To try Google Friend Connect for yourself, visit Mapdango.
