Earlier this week Google announced that their Friend Connect is now generally available (still in beta though). After watching the intro video I have to confess I still had a bit of a “why do I want this?” attitude. Like I often do in such situations, I decided to set it up here on the blog and see what happens. Hopefully that’ll answer my questions.
Configuring the gadgets is very simple. Even with setting colors I don’t think it took more than 10 minutes for me to add the main “membership” gadget and the rating/comments gadget to each post. The step by steps are very straight-forward.
Playing with the gadgets initially caused me some confusion. You see, the intro video mentions that folks can use Google, Yahoo!, AIM or OpenID accounts to log in. That’s actually one of the reasons I’m giving this a try: folks don’t need to create yet another account (looks at MyBlogLog). However, when I tried to do my initial sign-ins it would only offer me the Google Account option.
Turns out that if you’re already signed into your Google Account you’ll need to log out first, then you’ll get the other options as expected.
Brief Digression:
Nice variety of accounts. However, no Facebook or Windows live accounts? I wonder if that won’t cause some backlash. But whoops, I forgot Facebook Connect was announced last week as well. Ugh. How many of these “connect” thingies do we want to mess with?
Take a moment and go check out Dare’s article on Google Connect vs. FriendFeed Connect. Good stuff and thought-provoking.
Back to Google Connect: I have my widgets all setup. Now what?
That’s where I’m struggling. This could be neat and all, but I’m curious to see if it gets adopted. I mean, I’ve noticed from checking other sites using Friend Connect that it can be fun to click other members and find interesting links and such, but what else is there? And no, I have no interest in adding the spam bucket ^H^H wall gadget to my site. I’ve never seen one of those provide value…
Thoughts? I’ll keep it around for a bit and see what happens. I can’t deny that it would be cool to find a way to get more of a community feel to some of this blogging stuff without resorting to forum software!
Possibly Related posts:
December 7th, 2008 
Tags: 
