[English] Google announcement

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Google Announcement  May 12, 2008

Previewing Google Friend Connect: Website owners can make any site social

<http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20080512_friend_connect.html>

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (May 12, 2008) – Tonight at Campfire One at the 
Googleplex (http://code.google.com/campfire/), Google will announce a 
preview release of Google Friend Connect .. 

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and 
now they can be, easily. 

With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect 
following this evening's Campfire One), any website owner can add a 
snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running 
immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in 
functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, 
message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by 
the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, 
invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization 
APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including 
Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more ..

Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become 
more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. 

"Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be 
social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors 
interact with each other. That used to be hard. 

Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, 
OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, 
MySpace, and others. 

Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily 
connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, 
any site, any friends' a reality."

For Site Owners: Traffic and User Engagement 

Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site 
owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to 
connect with friends on their websites. 

Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their 
friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those 
sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors. 

Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications 
provides more interesting content and richer social experiences. 

Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a 
programming team or becoming a social network. 

Google Friend Connect is in a preview release, available tonight after 
Campfire One on a handful of whitelisted websites. 

All site owners interested in learning more about Google Friend Connect 
and signing up for the wait list can visit 

http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ starting tonight.

 In the weeks ahead we will be turning on more sites, adding more social 
applications, and integrating feedback from site owners and developers.
--

Cheers people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia