Google Friend Connect

You might have noticed some extra bits in the sidebar – wall & members. It’s because I’ve been playing around with google friend connect. The basic premise is that you can login with your Google (or Yahoo, AIM, OpenID) credentials without signing up for a separate account. So if you have one of these accounts try leaving a message on our wall. I’m not sure if it all works as intended but I’m sure you’ll leave me a comment if it doesn’t !!

I’ve also enabled the facebook equivalent….let me know if that’s more useful.

Comparing facebook with google: The facebook install is more complex, but it integrates better. You click the “Connect with facebook” button on the facebook social widget and it automatically registers you on this site. You have to do some developer stuff on facebook to get the link configured, and some of the admin stuff seems a bit buggy ( but that is probably the wordpress plugin rather than the facebook stuff).

Google on the other hand isn’t really integrated, your google login is separate and you can’t use it to post comment on this site. You can enable comments for google users but these are all external to the site and managed via google’s admin pages. So unless you force everyone to be googleised you could end up with your comments split between the two. As you can see by the two Wall boxes in the sidebar – one is for registered users, the other for google users. On the plus side it was fairly easy to install – you just paste google’s code into a text widget.

The main idea of these tools is to allow visitors to see who else is a “friend” of the site, but does that matter? We’ll have to see how many visitors can be bothered clicking on the join site buttons.