Social Widgets BETA to Webmasters from Google
Google has announced the availability of a tool for webmasters, allowing sites which lack social features to add commenting, profiles, and more.
The widget suite is called Friend Connect. The video at the Official Google Blog demonstrates signing up to sites with AOL, OpenID, Google and Yahoo accounts, commenting, making contacts, and rating and reviewing content. The video’s narrator promises Google will add new features regularly.
The widgets are based on Google’s OpenSocial mash-up system. Search Engine Land recently republished a FaberNovel slide show that suggested OpenSocial was an attempt to reign-in Facebook’s social networking dominance.
Unlike typical web 2.0 widgets, the features are added by both copying Javascript into a site’s template, and uploading files to the web server via FTP, according to the Friend Connect setup overview.
