Social Networking is one field on the Internet in which Google’s presence is limited and it is dominated by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc., though Google’s Friend Connect is an attempt to make a beginning in this direction. Friend Connect was launched by Google in December, 2008. It provides a set of tools that can add social networking tools and widgets to any website. Now, Google has made serious attempts to popularize Friend Connect amongst website owners and the users by adding some useful features to it.
These major updates to Friend Connect include features that will allow website owners help their visitors get to know one-another and personalize their site’s experience and content. Website owners can include these new features in an easy manner without any coding.
One such feature included in Friend Connect is to allow the website owners to add a new “Interests” section of their Friend Connect account, where they can add site-relevant questions that site users can answer when joining the website or via the poll gadget. It is expected to result into the users sharing more details about themselves which are relevant to the website they are on. This will facilitate visitors to the site knowing one-another better, thereby resulting into a better social “networking”. Moreover, the interests that people share on a website would be made available in the new “Community data” section of the website’s account in the form of easy-to-read charts.
Another new useful feature has added the ability for website users, who are connected by Friend Connect, to send private messages to one-another. Thus, when a user finds someone else who shares his interests, he can send a private message to that person via his Friend Connect profile to start a dialogue.
Then, there are certain new features in Friend Connect that will directly help the website owners. They can now send custom newsletters to their users using the new “Newsletter” section of their website account. Using data collected through “Interests”, a website owner can send out custom newsletters to different groups of his subscribers, based on the interest responses they submit. Of course, it is possible to send newsletters to all the subscribers of the website as well. Moreover, a website owner can now use the Personalized content gadget to automatically present a dynamic personalized set of links to his site’s content that matches each visitor’s specific interests. Another major advantage for the website owners (as also for Google itself) is that Friend Connect account now includes an “AdSense” section that allows them to enable Google ad units that are matched to their site’s content as well as to the interests website users publicly share on their websites. Better targeted AdSense ads are expected to help the website owners and Google both.
You can also watch the following YouTube video prepared by Google to explain the new features of Friend Connect:
Facebook, the most popular social networking site, has about 300 million users. Facebook Connect is a popular way to connect people. On the other hand, Google Friend Connect is now supported on about 9 million websites on the Internet, but the number of active users is much larger. However, Google has no full-fledged social network to back Friend Connect. The question is whether Friend Connect will become more popular than Facebook Connect in the coming days? Perhaps one has to wait and watch, though at this stage it seems difficult. Or, may be, perhaps Google will have to make more efforts to make its presence felt.
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