NEWS: Google Friend Connect: The movie

Ed: Game changer in the race among social networks and cloud providers for consumer mindshare. 

Google provides services such as Blogger, Picasso, Youtube, analytics, feedburner, Google reader, gMail, news alerts, and Adsense. 

Social networks have taken increasing mindshare away from news, email, and search. Does Friend Connect shift mindshare to blogs and other Google services? Stay tuned.

Google Friend Connect: The movie

Posted by Dan Farber

Google's third Campfire One event Monday night featured the debut of Friend Connect. David Glazer, Google director of engineering, has described Friend Connect as a "salt shaker full of social to sprinkle social features on a site in a matter of hours."

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, at the Friend Connect Campfire event.

(Credit: TechCrunch)

At this juncture, the salt is in short supply, but Google plans to make it broadly available to developers over the next few months. More on Friend Connect here.

Web masters and developers can sign up to get on the Friend Connect waiting list here.

The Friend Connect administration site presents a catalog of social gadgets, such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing, provided by Google and other developers. Users copy gadget code snippets and paste them into their sites. The member gadget allows for sign-in with Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID accounts; invites and display of activities from existing friends on social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5 and Plaxo; browsing member profiles across social networks; and connecting with new friends on a site.

(Credit: Google)

Check out the Google video on Friend Connect below.

See also:

TechCrunch

Techmeme

Google brings Friend Connect to the masses

Posted by Dan Farber Updated 3:15 PST May 12

As expected, Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming.

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect, whose site is inaccessible Monday morning, as plumbing for the rest of the Web.

"The Web is getting better by getting more social. We've baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site," Glazer said. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app."

I asked Glazer if Friend Connect is a response to Facebook Connect and MySpace.com's Data Availability. "People will speculate a lot in that direction. We didn't create this code in the three days (since Facebook and MySpace made their announcements)."...

Bits: Google Wants to Help Web Sites Make New Friends

from NYT > Technology

Google Friend Connect lets small Web sites offer social networking features by tapping into the existing systems run by AOL, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and others.

New From Google: AdWords Connect

from AllThingsDigital -- WSJ by John Paczkowski

 Google calls its latest data portability effort Friend Connect, but a better name might have been AdWord Connect. Because, like most Google initiatives, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Connecting people to ads?

And here’s a video provided by Google that explains how developers can add Friend Connect to their websites:

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