Social Web Blog

Google Friend Connect, now more personalized

2009-11-04T07:30:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted with the Official Google Blog)

On the subway, I bump elbows with a guy for 20 city blocks without exchanging a single word. Forty-five minutes later, I find the same guy at the local guitar shop, and we start to talk — turns out he plays a Gibson Les Paul just like I do. We may have been strangers on the train, but in the guitar shop, we discover our shared passion for guitars.

Often, the web can feel like that subway. There are probably people commuting to the places you regularly visit, but you don’t know who those people are, and your paths may never cross. With Google Friend Connect, we've been helping millions of website owners make their sites more like that guitar shop — a social place where visitors can get to know each other — and less like the anonymous subway ride.

With this in mind, we're thrilled to introduce a new set of Friend Connect features that let site owners help their visitors get to know each other and personalize their site's experience and content.

Break the ice

Visitors to your site can get to know each other better by sharing details about themselves that are relevant to the site they're on. As a site owner, you can help them do this by visiting the new "Interests" section of your Friend Connect account, where you can add site-relevant questions that people can answer when joining your website or via the poll gadget. For instance, if you have a music website, you might ask people to share their favorite bands, the last concert they attended, or where they discover new music. Or if you run a hiking site, you can ask them about a favorite hike or national park. The details people share are added to their Friend Connect public profiles for your site, which are seen by other site visitors. This way, your visitors can learn more about each other in the context of the interests that bring them to your website.

We've also added the ability for people to send private messages to each other. That way, when a user discovers someone who shares their interests, they can send a message to that person via their Friend Connect profile to start a dialogue.

And as with any data you collect on Friend Connect, you can use open export tools and APIs to integrate this information with any other systems you might use. The interests people share on your website are also made available in the new "Community data" section of your account in the form of easy-to-read charts.

Personalize your website experience

The ice-breaking isn't limited to your visitors; you'll learn more about them too. The interests people share make it possible for you to create a more personalized experience on your website in a number of ways:

Send custom newsletters: The new "Newsletter" section of your account lets you create, send and manage newsletters. And with the help of "Interests," you can either send out newsletters to all your subscribers, or send out custom newsletters to different segments of your subscribers, based on the interest responses they submit.
Personalized content gadget: This new Friend Connect gadget automatically presents a dynamic personalized set of links to your site's content that matches each visitor's specific interests. Is a visitor learning how to play swing music? Links to articles your site has published about playing swing are presented to him or her.
Google ads: For those of you who display ads on your website, your Friend Connect account now includes an "AdSense" section that lets you enable Google ad units that are matched both to your site's content and to the interests users publicly share on your website.

All these new features are easy to implement and require no coding whatsoever. Here's a quick tour of what Friend Connect now has to offer:

If you'd like to see the new features in action, check out some of our partners' sites, like sfstation.com, huffingtonpost.com, metrolyrics.com, and pachakam.com.

We're excited to see the web evolve into a place where visitors of all websites can get to know each other — to share and discuss the things they care about most. To get started with Friend Connect, visit www.google.com/friendconnect.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect now Powering Discuz!

2009-10-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

We are excited to announce the release of the Google Friend Connect Plugin for Discuz! 7.0. This project is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/google-friend-connect-plugins/.

Google Friend Connect allows simple user authentication using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, or AIM. Instead of filling in yet another profile form, your users can connect to their existing identities, showing current profile pictures and information. The ability to easily integrate profiles increases user engagement and activity on Google Friend Connect enabled sites.

Google Friend Connect plugins are currently available for WordPress, phpBB and Drupal. Today, we're very pleased to announce a new plugin that will make it easy for webmasters to use Google Friend Connect on their Discuz! sites. Discuz! is one of the most popular forum platforms, so we think a lot of users and site-owners will benefit from this new tool.

Example page: after installing Google Friend Connect Plugin

Example page: user successfully logged into forum using Google Friend Connect Plugin

Features:

Based on the latest release of Discuz! (Discuz! 7.0).

Multi-language support: English, Simplified Chinese(UTF8, GBK) and Traditional Chinese(UTF8, BIG5).

Support for various templates in Discuz!. Even if you use your own customized templates, it will not require extra effort to install this plugin.

Easy to install. Just download the plugin, upload it to your server directory, and edit the configuration files according to the installation instructions.

Use Google Friend Connect profile information, such as your profile picture and your personal bio, in your Discuz! profile. The plugin can also propagate changes from your Google Friend Connect profile to Discuz!, keeping your information current.

To see the plugin in action, please visit the demo sites (in English and Chinese). If you are a Discuz! forum administrator, you can download the plugin as a zip archive and follow the instructions for installation to deploy it on your site. The code is open sourced under Apache License 2.0, and contributions are not only welcomed, but encouraged. This project hosts an issue tracker which will be populated with known issues and requested enhancements, so please use the tracker to report any new bugs or incompatibilities you find, or to request new features.

For more information, please check the user manual.

Posted by Xiaohui Lin, Jacky Wang, Sha-Mayn Teh, OpenSocial Team

Strengthen your blog's community: Google Friend Connect now available for Wordpress

2009-10-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

This guest post was written by Mauro Gonzalez from Globant. - Ed.

I recently developed a plugin to add Google Friend Connect social features to WordPress blogs. This plugin allows your visitors to authenticate using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on your posts with no need to complete a registration form.

When a visitor authenticates as described above, a WordPress account is automatically created for them. You can later add or remove permissions for the visitor from the WordPress site administration pages. If desired, WordPress comments can be replaced by Google Friend Connect comments gadgets. In this case, no WordPress account is created, since Google Friend Connect handles both the rendering of the comments as well as comments moderation. Regardless of whether the Google Friend Connect comments gadgets are enabled or not, comment entries display the user profile picture and link to the user’s profile. In addition, a set of social gadgets are available, such as the Social Bar, Members, Recommendations, and Global Conversation gadgets. When recommendations are enabled, a "Recommend" button is displayed below your posts allowing the site members to choose the content they like most. The most popular posts will surface to the top of the list within the recommendations gadget.

The blog activities -such as posting content or commenting on a post- are submitted to the Google Friend Connect activity stream, which is visible on the social bar. All of the plugin features, as well as the color scheme, size, and labels of the social gadgets are easily configurable via admin panel, using regular WordPress admin interfaces. The plugin installation does not require any programming skills at all and you can get it at the Google Code site. To see this plugin in action visit either the WordPress with native comments demo or the WordPress with Friend Connect comments demo.

Posted by Mauro Gonzalez, Globant

Chowdown GFC samples now in C# and PHP

2009-10-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

This post is of a geeky nature, feel free to skip it if you're not wearing a propeller beanie. - Ed.

Those of you who have tried your hand with the developer side of Google Friend Connect might have seen The Chow Down application, a sample website that demonstrates how Google Friend Connect can be cleanly integrated into a website with an existing login mechanism. Today, we are glad to announce that this sample is now available in two more languages: C# and PHP. Both the samples have been kept as similar to the original Python sample as possible.

The C# version of The Chow Down has been developed as an ASP.NET website and is compatible with the Mono environment. The latest stable release of its source code is available for download. You may also obtain the source code from the repository.

The PHP release is also available for download and its source code can be found in the repository as well. The PHP version uses the OpenSocial PHP client library to connect to Google Friend Connect.

The source code for both samples are freely available for use under the Apache 2 license.

We hope you like these samples and use them as reference to integrate Google Friend Connect with your websites. Feel free to discuss these samples on the developer mailing list.

Posted by Anash P. Oommen, Google Developer Relations

Google Friend Connect: Look, ma...no files!

2009-10-02T10:22:00.001-07:00

Normally when we misplace files here at the Googleplex, we ask our best engineers to get them back. But today, we've gotten rid of a few files on purpose, and we're happy to see them go!

Today, we're making it even easier to get started with Google Friend Connect. We've heard from a number of you that uploading files to activate your website is not always easy. So starting today, you no longer have to worry about downloading or uploading files. Setting up a new website just involves entering your site's name and URL upon logging into www.google.com/friendconnect.

Additionally, we've updated the "canvas mode" that's used inside gadgets. So now, when you click the zoom icon in the upper right corner of some gadgets, you'll see a lightbox that displays the gadgets' contents, instead of being taken to a new webpage.

To get started with Google Friend Connect, visit www.google.com/friendconnect.

Posted by Jonathan Terleski, UI Designer, Google Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect and Elgg

2009-09-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

This guest post was written by Arunoda Susiripala, who is an undergraduate student at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. He stepped into web development 2 years ago and developed the JConnect Integration Engine as part of the Google Summer of Code 2009. In his spare time, he enjoys playing rugby and watching comedies. - Ed.

Google Friend Connect provides a novel way to integrate social features onto any web page and is great for interacting with people from around the web. One of my favorite features is its ability to allow people to log in to websites with existing accounts.

That's why I decided to look into integrating Google Friend Connect with Elgg. Elgg is the best open source social networking platform available, but it's users have difficulty with attracting people to their Elgg sites/communities and getting them to register. So they often also try to provide people with some other means to login, whether it was OpenID, Facebook, or something else.

Once I learned about Friend Connect, I knew it could do more than the other options because it allowed people to log in to sites with accounts from many different services, such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and OpenID. So I started to develop a plugin to integrate the backend of Elgg with Friend Connect so that people could log in with these accounts. It worked really well and I was able to get it to pass the user's name and image from Friend Connect to Elgg. I also integrated the Friend Connect social bar with the plugin so users can easily enable or disable it.

The integration with Friend Connect was very easy compared to the integration of other services and only required a minimal amount of work. The three steps I took to integrate Elgg with Friend Connect were:

Use the JavaScript API to let people log in with Friend Connect
Use the cookie stored by Friend Connect to get information using the REST API
Then do the Elgg logic with the obtained information

This Elgg plugin is in its alpha state and needs further improvement. I also plan to add more features and more gadgets. So go try it out on the demo site and let me know what you think. I hope this plugin will help to make the web more social.

Posted by Arunoda Susiripala, Web Developer

iGoogle goes social

2009-08-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, the web became a little more social with the introduction of social gadgets for iGoogle. With several new social gadgets, iGoogle users can now collaborate via a social To-Do list, read and post movie reviews with the Flixster Movies gadget, and share media with the YouTube and NPR gadgets. Playing games with friends has also been popular, with over 120,000 people already adding Chess, Scrabble, or Who has the biggest brain? to their homepage.

Watch this video to learn more:

If you're a developer using the OpenSocial API, this is great news. You can now reach tens of millions of iGoogle users in Australia and the US, with more countries to follow. To learn more about creating a social gadget for iGoogle, check out the iGoogle Developer Blog and Google Code.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Keep up with your friends with Google Latitude

2009-07-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

In February we launched Google Latitude, a service that lets you to see where your friends are and what they're up to, while allowing you to maintain very fine-grained control over how your location is seen by the people you care about.

Today, we're bringing Latitude to the iPhone and iPod touch as a web application accessible by going to google.com/latitude from the Safari browser. To easily access Latitude, try creating a home screen link using Safari's "+" icon.

Check out the Google Mobile Blog to learn more.

Mat Balez, Product Manager, Google Mobile Team

Friend Connect goes îñţérñåţîöñåļ

2009-07-14T06:50:00.000-07:00

Many of you have asked for it and it's finally here. With over 5 million sites using Google Friend Connect to awaken and strengthen their communities, we wanted to make it easier for those of you who prefer languages other than English to take full advantage of it. Today, we are happy to announce that Friend Connect is supported in 47 additional languages.

As a site owner, you can view google.com/friendconnect in any of these languages, which should make setting up your site much more intuitive. Better yet, you can now choose the language of your site (which can be different for each of your sites). Once selected, most Google-created gadgets and any translated third party gadgets on your site will automatically render in that language. This ensures that the Friend Connect gadgets are better integrated into your site and easily understood by your visitors. Visit the gadget gallery to see which gadgets are available in your language.

Friend Connect is now supported in Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Go to google.com/friendconnect to set up your site. Or if you're developing gadgets for Friend Connect, make sure to check out the documentation on localizing OpenSocial applications.

Posted by Sami Shalabi, Technical Lead, Google Friend Connect

Recent developments from around the social web

2009-07-10T12:20:00.000-07:00

From time to time, we'd like to highlight some news from around the social web. In case you missed it, here are two stories that have crossed our radar:

Netlog and Google Friend Connect - Netlog used the open standards of OpenID and OAuth to integrate with Friend Connect, allowing their users to sign into Friend Connect with their Netlog credentials, use their Netlog profiles, and more.

OpenSocial apps on orkut - OpenSocial apps on orkut now have popularity and usage statistics on the "application info" page and can be found by category.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

Introducing the ClackPoint gadget

2009-06-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

This guest post was written by the ClackPoint Team from Vipadia (UK). ClackPoint is the protocol-agnostic cloud-based real-time collaboration platform. Visit http://clackpoint.com for more information. - Ed.

Now that you've added Google Friend Connect to your site and are using some of the great gadgets to develop your community, have you wanted more direct communication with and between community members? Well, ClackPoint gives you exactly this by mixing text chat, conference calling and a dash of document sharing, and presenting it as a gadget for Friend Connect.

The ClackPoint gadget doesn't just let your users chat live in a text-based chat room, it also lets them dial in and talk either directly from their computer or, if they prefer, by phone. Status icons in the gadget mean that users can see who is dialed in and who is talking, and can poke or mute themselves or each other.

In addition to supporting live text and audio chat, ClackPoint also provides collaboration features, including a shared notepad allowing multiple users to edit simultaneously, and slide sharing for those times when your community needs to present and discuss written information.

We think that integrating online collaboration with Friend Connect makes a lot of sense. Friend Connect is already a great way to extend a website with social features to build a community, and the heart of any community is how it communicates and interacts with itself and others. Bringing live text, voice and document sharing into a website keeps users on that site and strengthens the community built around it.

Developing a gadget for Friend Connect was a great experience. Friend Connect's use of OpenSocial meant we could target multiple social networks with one code base, greatly accelerating our development.

Visit our sample website to see this gadget in action and learn more about it.

Posted by the ClackPoint Team, Vipadia

See who's visiting to your site with the Footprints gadget

2009-06-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

This guest post was written by Eiji Kitamura, a developer of one of the biggest portal sites in Japan called "goo". On May 21st, 2009, "goo home" publicly launched the first Japan oriented OpenSocial container. He is also a Google API Expert, PHP Shindig contributer, and leader of the SocialWeb Japan community. - Ed.

My name is Eiji Kitamura and I developed the Footprints gadget for Google Friend Connect. This gadget let's you see which of your members have recently visited your site by displaying up to 10 of their footprints. The gadget shows the name of the visitor, their photo, and the approximate time they last visited your site. Clicking on a visitor's photo will take you to their profile, where you can learn more about them and add them as a friend. Your visitors will have the option to remove their own footprints if they do not want to appear in the gadget.

I wanted to make this feature available for sites using Friend Connect because it is actually quite common in Japanese social networking services. It enables people to see who visited their diary (another popular feature) and encourages them to communicate with one another.

Creating a gadget for Friend Connect was as simple as creating an OpenSocial gadget. Most of specs are exactly the same, except for the concept of permissions. OpenSocial gadgets on social network services always have someone as an owner, but Friend Connect gadgets have the site itself as the owner and the members of the site are then treated as friends of the owner.

To learn more about creating Friend Connect gadgets, visit Google Code. And visit my blog to see the Footprints gadget in action.

Posted by Eiji Kitamura, Gadget Developer

Designing a lounge for the Day in the Cloud

2009-06-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

Accessing the web from 35,000 feet in the air is becoming more of a reality thanks to airlines like Virgin America, who recently rolled out in-flight WiFi across their fleet. Now that you can get online, even from the clouds, Google Apps and Virgin America are teaming up to co-host a timed online scavenger hunt called the Day in the Cloud Challenge on Wednesday, June 24th. Thousands of people in the air and on the ground that day will participate in a one-hour challenge which consists of a series of puzzles and trivia questions. The top 5 scorers will receive a "Year in the Cloud" prize package, which includes a year of free flights from Virgin America, free in-flight Wi-Fi, a netbook computer, and 1 terabyte of Google Account storage for Gmail and Picasa Web Albums.

When developing the site for the Day in the Cloud Challenge, the team needed a space where competitors could meet each other and hang out prior to (and during) the challenge. They turned to Google Friend Connect to provide this functionality.

They first developed The Lounge to fit the design of the rest of the site. Then they added a members gadget, giving it ample space so that competitors could learn more about each other. Below that, they placed a comments gadget to encourage spirited pre-game banter between the players. After embedding YouTube videos to give participants ideas for how to prep for the challenge, they used a Polls gadget to add engagement to the site, asking people what they really do to pass the time on a long-haul flight.

Visit The Lounge to engage in some banter, take the poll, and get ready for the challenge. On game-day (June 24th) check back to see site members discuss the game all throughout the day.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

Back from Google I/O

2009-06-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

We're back from attending Google I/O in San Francisco, and it was great meeting those of you who were there. For those who couldn't make it (or if you were there and missed something), videos of each session are now posted online along with the slides from the presentations.

A few sessions I particularly enjoyed were:

Google Friend Connect Gadgets: Best Practices in Code and Interaction Design - Ryan Boyd and Jonathan Terleski discussed the best practices for designing and writing OpenSocial gadgets for the millions of sites and blogs using Friend Connect.
Beyond Cut and Paste: Deep integrations with Google Friend Connect - Arne Roomann-Kurrik and Chris Schalk demonstrated how to integrate Google Friend Connect with existing login systems and add social functionality using the REST and RPC APIs.
The Social Web: An Implementer's Guide - Joseph Smarr discussed the current state of the social web and the adoption of a variety of open technologies helping to make the web more social.
Google and the Social Web - Daniel Holevoet explained how Google is using social features in our products and announced the new support for OpenSocial gadgets in Google Calendar.

A summary of all the sessions in the social track can be found on the Google Code Blog. Go check these out, relive any you liked, and leave a comment with your thoughts.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

Developing and distributing social gadgets just got easier

2009-06-04T13:05:00.000-07:00

Creating a social gadget for Google Friend Connect just became a little easier and more flexible. Here are some of the recent changes that will impact you as a developer:

Friend Connect now supports OpenSocial Specification v0.9, which adds a number of important features to improve the gadget development process and the performance of gadgets. These features include OS Lite, OSML, templates, proxied content and more.
Want to ask site owners to configure additional preferences before adding your gadget to their sites? Now you can with the gadgets.Prefs functionality. Define the preferences you need in the XML gadgets specification, and the site owner will be asked to provide the values for the preferences when they get the code for the gadget. More information on the XML definition for these preferences is available in the OpenSocial XML Reference.
Let site owners customize the color of your gadget to match their sites. When the site owners generate the code for the gadget, they will have the option to set the colors they want to use, ensuring that the gadget integrates well with the style of their site. For more information on OpenSocial skins, see the gadgets.skins API reference.
After your gadget is built, we would like to include it in the Friend Connect gadget gallery so that site owners will have more ways to engage their visitors. After testing your gadget and making sure it has the required fields in the gadget XML file, submit it for inclusion in our gallery. We will review your gadget and add it to our gallery once it is approved.

To learn more, visit Google Code. Thanks for taking the time to create your gadget and we look forward to seeing all the innovative gadgets that will make the web more social. With more than 5 million sites using Friend Connect, we're sure they'll find some good homes.

Posted by Sami Shalabi, Technical Lead, Google Friend Connect

Introducing the Conversations element

2009-05-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

Have you been looking for a way to easily add your favorite Google products to your own site? Now you can with Google Web Elements.

There are several different elements, including ones for Calendar, News, and Maps. But the one that may be of most interest to the readers of the Social Web Blog is the Conversation element. This element, powered by Google Friend Connect, lets your visitors post comments restricted to just your site or participate in a global conversation based on a topic of interest.

A global conversation takes place on several web sites simultaneously and will have a "Global conversation" label underneath the title. When visitors post to a global conversation on a specific topic, such as mandolins (as shown in the image below), the post not only shows up on the site where they posted it, but it also on any site that chooses to embed a Conversation element on mandolins, now or in the future. So now your visitors can talk about mandolins with others interested in the same topic, no matter what site they're on.

Because the Conversation element is powered by Friend Connect, visitors will be able to leave a comment by signing in with their existing Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID account. Their photos will appear next to their comments and others will be able to learn more about them by viewing their profiles. And if they see comments in a foreign language, they can use the translate feature to view those comments in their own language.

You can choose from a number of predetermined topics such as cooking, movies, photography, and travel, or be creative and come up with a topic of your own. If you see a Conversation gadget you like on another site, simply click the "Embed this" link to get the code to paste it onto your own site.

We know that there are many topics you're interested in conversing about, and we're looking forward to seeing numerous global conversations ensue.

Posted by Cassie Doll, Software Engineer, Google Friend Connect

Surface your best content

2009-05-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

You spend a lot of time creating great content for your site, but are you ever curious about which parts of your website your community likes best? Now you and your visitors can easily find out with the new Recommendation gadgets for Google Friend Connect.

Members can recommend the content they like, anything from a whole page to a single photo, by simply clicking a button. Then you and anyone who visits your site can see what parts of your site are the most popular. The items with the most votes will surface to the top of the list, making it easier for others to find even if it's buried deep within your site. You can even see which members have recommended a given item and learn more about them.

To learn more about the recommendation gadgets, check out this sample site or watch the video below:

To add the recommendation gadgets to your site, go to google.com/friendconnect. And if you're interested in developing your own gadgets for Friend Connect, make sure to check out the Google Friend Connect Gadgets: Best Practices in Code and Interaction Design session at Google I/O. On Wednesday, May 27th, at 1:45pm, our own Ryan Boyd and Jonathan Terleski will be hosting a discussion about the best practices for designing and writing OpenSocial gadgets for the million of sites and blogs using Friend Connect. Members of the Friend Connect team will also be on hand during office hours to answer your questions. Hope to see you there.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

Answers to common questions about the Google profile

2009-05-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

We recently announced that we now show Google profile results at the bottom of the U.S. name-query search pages. This gives you greater control over what people find when they search for your name on Google.

While some of you may already be familiar with creating a Google profile, here are some common questions we wanted to answer:

I saw suggested links when I created my profile. Where did they come from?

We use the Social Graph API to find pages that you've publicly identified as your own, and surface these pages as suggested links when you're creating your profile.

What should I add to the links section?

Your profile should serve as a hub to your other content on the web. Some common links you might want to include are your Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, your Picasa Web and Flickr albums, your blog, etc.

Why would I want to share my "Contact info" with everyone?

The "Contact info" tab is only visible to the people you choose; it's not public. It is an easy way to keep your friends and family up-to-date with your information.

How do I add a "Verified name" badge to my profile?

To display a "Verified name" badge on your profile, you need to verify your name using Knol

We're eager to hear your feedback about how we can make these profiles a desirable hub for your content and how you feel about profiles giving you additional control over how you appear at the bottom of search results pages. You can now find us on Twitter as @googleprofiles. Tell us what you think using Twitter or leave feedback and vote on features on our Google Moderator page.

Posted by Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager

YouTube RealTime invites for Social Web Blog readers

2009-04-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

Last week you may have read on the YouTube blog that we launched YouTube RealTime, a persistent toolbar on YouTube which allows you to see which of your YouTube friends are currently online and what they're watching, a history of their recent activities on the site, and real-time notifications when they perform activities like commenting, favoriting, and uploading.

We launched it on an exclusive invite basis only and invited the first 100 people to write "Yes! Sign me up" in the comments section of the blog post. We saw lots of interest on the YouTube blog, so we ~~wanted to share~~ shared 25 more invitations with the readers of this blog. ~~Therefore, if you want to test this cool new tool out, just write "Yes! Sign me up" along with your YouTube username in the comments section below and we'll add the first 25 respondents.~~

Please keep in mind that you will need to have friends on YouTube for this to work -- the more you have, the richer the experience, so be sure you accept friend invites and actively manage the list. Participants can enter feedback on RealTime in the forums.

Posted by Curtis Lee, YouTube Team

Engage your community with the Get Answers gadget

2009-04-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

This guest post was written by Barry Welch, a social app developer and a speaker at the Google Friend Connect launch who likes to create apps that foster visitor interaction, increase website traffic, and/or generate revenue for site owners. Barry relies on Google App Engine to provide speed and scale for his web apps. - Ed.

If you're seeking to get your community more engaged, you'll want to give them more ways to connect with one another and contribute to your site. In addition to the other gadgets available through Google Friend Connect, there's now the Get Answers gadget. Adding the Get Answers gadget to your site will encourage visitors to ask questions of the community and answer questions posed by others, creating a clear invitation to interact.

For visitors looking to connect and contribute to your community, the Get Answers gadget lets site members
* Ask questions, submit answers, and vote on the answers they think are the best
* Read other questions and answers from the community, sorted by popularity or date
* Quickly view only their own questions to see the answers they've received
* See what Google search says about their question

With the Get Answers gadget, new members can ask questions and get up to speed quickly, current members can share information relevant to your site topic or other topics of interest to them, and you (the site owner) can learn more about the interests of your community, which can help you tailor your content to your visitors' needs. As the site owner, you remain in full control and can moderate the gadget by deleting any inappropriate questions or answers.

View a sample site using this gadget, or learn more about the Get Answers gadget and how to add it to your own site.

Posted by Barry Welch, Social App Developer

Making Polls Social

2009-04-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

This guest post was written by Alex Epshteyn who is the founder of typeracer.com, a popular browser-based real-time typing tournament. He started developing for the OpenSocial platform over a year ago with the TypeRacer application for orkut and MySpace. Alex has been successfully leveraging Google developer tools such as Google Web Toolkit and App Engine to create compelling social applications such as TypeRacer and this Polls Gagdet. Alex holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from UMass Amherst and was an intern at Google in 2005. - Ed.

You've seen them on thousands of websites – opinion polls which ask you a question of interest and then show you the number of people who voted on each answer choice. If you're a webmaster, polls are a fun and easy way for your visitors to express themselves and a great tool for you to see what your users like.

Traditionally, all these votes have been condensed into a set of numbers and percentage bars, but the new Polls Gadget for Google Friend Connect is giving opinion polls a human face (literally). The Polls Gadget makes it easy to publish opinion polls on your friend connected website and adds a social element by displaying the faces of the community members and friends who voted on each answer.

Google Friend Connect makes poll results more accurate because votes are tied to each user's account, more interesting because you can see who voted on each answer, and, best of all, you can discover like minded members who have similar tastes! For instance, I just discovered that a member, Mussie, and I have the same favorite track on the new U2 album.

You can try the Polls Gadget for yourself and add it to your friend connected website free of charge. You will have full control over publishing polls on your site. In the future, we're planning to also give you the option of syndicating your polls across the web, letting other web masters host them on their site

The Polls Gadget was built using Google Web Toolkit for extra interface richness, Google App Engine for extra scalability, and OpenSocial, well, for all that social stuff.

Posted by Alex Epshteyn, Founder of typeracer.com

Promote your event with a new gadget

2009-04-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

Google Calendar has always been a great tool for planning group events, and whether it's a concert by your favorite band or a new exhibit at your local museum, attending an event with people who share your passion for classic rock or modern art can make the experience all the more enjoyable. Today we're launching a new event gadget for Google Friend Connect that lets site owners spread the word about upcoming events that may be of interest to their communities.

Do you run a website about local biking trails? Use the event gadget to organize a group ride by posting a public event on your site. Members of your site can sign in and RSVP, and their responses will appear directly on the website. Visitors can see if any of their friends will be joining, and can add the event to their personal Google Calendars with just a click. To ensure that no one gets lost on the way, a Google Map showing the event's location is automatically embedded. Of course, that doesn't mean you should limit yourself to physical events -- host a virtual meet-up or "webinar" and share all of the important dial in codes through the event gadget.

Visit our sample site to try out the gadget for yourself or go to google.com/friendconnect to add one to your own site.

Posted by Yoah Bar-David, Software Engineer, Google Calendar

Recent developments from around the social web

2009-04-10T07:02:00.000-07:00

From time to time, we'd like to highlight some news from around the social web. In case you missed it, here are some stories that have crossed our radar:
- Change the Web Challenge - Social Actions is running a challenge to create widgets and web applications that help people connect to opportunities to make a difference all over the web. There are $10,000 in prizes, so go vote for your favorite Projects before 3:00 pm PDT today.
- 2009 Webware 100 - Google Friend Connect and the standards which power it (OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth) were nominated as finalists for the 2009 Webware 100 in the Infrastructure & Storage category. Voting ends on Thursday, April 30th.
- Gmail Labs gadgets now support OpenSocial - If you've been building social gadgets using OpenSocial APIs, you can now try making some for Gmail.
- eBay announced Selling Manager Apps beta - The Selling Manager (SM) suite of productivity tools now supports the OpenSocial gadget spec and has opened up the beta platform to all developers.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

Check out Google I/O

2009-03-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

Want to meet other people using Google and open web technologies to make the web more social? Then come to Google I/O on May 27 & 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California. Google I/O is a developer gathering focused on pushing the boundaries of web applications with these tools. Google engineers and web development leaders will lead you through two days full of in-depth breakout sessions on the latest technologies, and informal Q&A at Fireside Chats. There will be several sessions of particular interest to those readers of this blog, including Building a Business with Social Apps, Google and the Social Web, Make Your Website More Social, and Designing OpenSocial Apps for Speed and Scale. Members of the Google Friend Connect team and the OpenSocial team will be on hand to answer your questions. So if you're in the area or need a reason to visit, go register now.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

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Leave a comment, comentário, ou commentaire

Answers to common questions about the Google profile

YouTube RealTime invites for Social Web Blog readers

Engage your community with the Get Answers gadget

Making Polls Social

Promote your event with a new gadget

Recent developments from around the social web

Check out Google I/O