After a few months of rumours, Google will be opening up Friend Connect to a few select number of partners. One of the challenges to website owners wanting to experiment with Web2.0 is the cost and time taken to incorporate social networking tools within their sites.

What Google has done (via an initial trial/select number of partners) is offer dozens of social gadgets created by Google and OpenSocial developers to their visitors. This means more visitors spending more time on a more engaging website -- with absolutely no programming required to make it happen. It's a perfect way to start to trial Web2.0 features without having to spend thousands on bespoke developments.

Google Friend Connect provides a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing. The key gadget is the members gadget which provides the core social features for your visitors:

• sign-in with their existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account (note that it's not just Google or Gmail accounts)
• invite and show activity to existing friends from social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more
• browse member profiles across social networks
• connect with new friends on your site

The developer community has been creating hundreds of applications for OpenSocial, an open standard for social applications over the past 18 months and once Friend Connect has been added to the site, the owner can offer many of these applications to their users, simply by pasting the relevant code or gadget into your site.

So what can it really be used for. There's thousands of potential applications however these were the ones that Google initially highlighted to their partners:

• An academic site - Discuss and review articles in context with colleagues and the broader community. Filter the discussion to colleagues only, or widen your view. Forge connections with new participants whose comments seem particularly insightful.
• A shopping site - Read expert reviews and tips right next to the product you're thinking of buying, and find a friend who has already purchased the same item.
• A travel site - Review a hotel and provide comments which clarify or improve it.
• A band site - Post pictures from your latest gig on the band's site, and communicate directly with your fans.
• An extreme sports site - Play a Flash game, then compare your score to friends and other site members.
• A charity site - Cultivate a community around your cause, post pictures at fund raisers, let donors connect, and involve their friends.

How do you make money from it?

The biggest challenge for social networks is not just about them becoming more open and getting more members, but about how they can make money and really assist the business (and in turn, the members). It won't be long before these Google Friend Connect sites will have the option of connecting via AdSense creating a much stronger profile of the potential visitor and through the increasd user data flowing through the Friend Connect engine. Just sign up to Googles terms and conditions and you're away :-)

Posted by Chris Haresign