Google Friend Connect

Social networks sites has been very common to most people nowadays. I can tell that anyone who knows how to use a computer and the internet is a member of a social network site. Even elementary kids have Friendster accounts and most probably they will ask you, "May friendster ka ba? Add mo naman ako..."

Just look at Friendster, Facebook and Multiply who earn millions of dollars every month. And now Google has joined the social networking game, but in a different approach! A couple of weeks ago, Google announced the launch of Google Friend Connect and has just opened up beta testing to a select number of people. I think this is a big step of Google and will quickly become a contender in this space.

Google Friend Connect is a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site. This is one useful tool for bloggers to get more visitors in their site.

Google Friend Connect boasts the following high-level features:

* Attract more visitors to your site - Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

* Enrich your site with social features - Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

* No programming whatsoever - Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

There are a couple of example sites already setup which you can test and interact with.

If you are interested in participating in the preview release, you can sign-up directly in their site here. I just applied today and hopefully I will get accepted and can start using Google Friend Connect.

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