Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Wondering how to make your site more social? We'd like to make it easier for you, which is why earlier tonight at Campfire One at the Googleplex, we announced a preview release of Google Friend Connect.

Google Friend Connect is a service that helps you grow traffic by enabling you to easily provide social features for your visitors. Just add a snippet of code, and, voilá, you can add social functionality—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.

Social features can generate buzz and traffic to your pages. Using Google Friend Connect on your site, your visitors will be able to see, invite, and interact with their friends from existing sources of friends, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. And you'll be able to more actively engage your visitors by adding social features from a growing gallery of social applications.

We've heard from many site owners that even though their sites aren't social networks, they'd still like them to be social. Whether your site sells car parts or dishes out great guacamole recipes—like the sample site in the YouTube video above—you can visit https://www.google.com/friendconnect/ or read more on the Official Google Blog to learn about Google Friend Connect. Right now, the preview is available for only a few sites, but soon we'll give the green light to even more. Sign up now to be on the wait list.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager