Google Releases Friend Connect Community Widget

Published by on December 4, 2008

Similar to MyBlogLog, Google has just released their Friend Connect suite of site tools for blogs and sites to help foster community elements. I’ve installed the Friend Connect Community Widget to my sidebar, and it’s mighty lonely being the only member of my community, so please signup and see what you think about these new tools.

The process of creating the widget was very Google-esque, and I was done in about 5 minutes. So far, I’m the only member of the site, but there is a big upside with this Friend Connect. One of my biggest complaints about MyBlogLog is that it is so damned slow. It’s always slowing down the loading of my pages and their interface is utterly worthless.

Friend Connect Setup

Getting the actual widget setup was a breeze, there is an introduction screen that sort of describes what to expect with these new features, and customizing the widget was also extremely easy.

The Friend Connect features themselves appear to be in Beta, much like almost all of the Google products, however, it is built around the Open Social framework, so there should be a lot more widgets available soon, with the easy of use of plug and play functionality — no programming required.

So please join the community, slap the widget on your blog, and let’s start building this Friend Connect from the ground up–