December 29, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Google released Friend Connect recently, and already the company is planning to develop a revenue stream from it, a number of reports suggest.
Friend Connect is a ‘widget’ that allows website owners to add a Web 2.0 dimension to their sites by adding social network functionalities. See
this video for a deeper insight.
Rather than covering the potentially enormous cost of coding a full social network solution, Google Friend Connect powers allows website owners to add utilize a number of ‘social gadgets’ that allow users to ‘join’ a site, make comments in a feature similar to a Facebook ‘wall’, and ‘Review/Rate’ items on a site. It also shows pictures which lead to profiles of members. The features can be customized so they fit the look and feel of a site and adding them is a simple as adding a few lines of code to a sites html.
Friend Connect is set to revolutionize social networking through its adoption of Google’s OpenSocial platform. Immediately users can sign into your site using their Google and Yahoo! IDs, as can Facebook, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo users. Google promises more options to follow shortly. The revolutionary factor here is that Friend Connect could potentially unify social networking, providing an umbrella for all social networks, allowing networks to feed off each other. Given the potential benefits to social network users, Google is of course looking to benefit from its efforts.
According to a recent item on
TechCrunch by Michael Arrington, people at Google have already termed the self-explanatory phrase, “FriendSense’. The article purports that Google is looking to use Friend Connect as a “shoehorn to insert advertising onto third party websites”. For Google, Friend Connect offers enormous potential and, depending on how they approach the opportunity, it could very well become its main cash cow.
