1. Home
  2. Computing & Technology
  3. Google
photo of Marziah Karch

Marziah's Google Blog

By Marziah Karch, About.com Guide to Google

Google Friend Connect

Wednesday May 14, 2008
Google announced Friend Connect on Monday with very limited beta preview access. This is a new service that will allow website developers to add social elements to their Web pages without having to make their own social network or even do any programming at all.

Visitors to Friend Connect enabled sites can log in with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! accounts, and the sites also attempt to pull in connected visitors from their Facebook, orkut and Google Talk networks. The idea is that you leverage social networks to increase the traffic on your site.

I want to like the idea, but I get a huge amount of silly and useless Facebook spam from my connected friends as it is. Do you want to take my pickle quiz? Five of your friends have just taken this quiz. I've ended up closing other social networking tools over the constant spam recruiting. Friend Connect may end up backfiring for Google.

Comments

May 15, 2008 at 2:09 pm
(1) Allan says:

I agree enthusiastically. The spam I get on Facebook alone is maddening. Imagine multiplying that by several times as you plug into Friend Connect and potentially draw notifications from the multiple social networks your friends reside.

Leave a Comment

Line and paragraph breaks are automatic. Some HTML allowed: <a href="" title="">, <b>, <i>, <strike>

Explore Google

More from About.com

  1. Home
  2. Computing & Technology
  3. Google

©2008 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company.

All rights reserved.