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Google Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect

adam — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:22:53 +0000

Google and Facebook both launched services today and you may be faced with a decision about which to use. Both offer very similar ways to allow users to log in to your Web site with either their Facebook or Google account. Both allow you to make your Web site more social (potentially more viral), and give you way more information about your visitors. I’ll take you on a quick walk through in this short video.

Both Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect add social features to your website. Google Friend Connect is now running on this blog. You can do much deeper integrations, but this will give you the flavor of it. So, effectively I can sign in using my Google credentials and then invite friends, precipitate in comments, all using my Google account.

Check out Sociable.es to see the Facebook implementation running on a WordPress blog (a more official Wordpress Plug-in is rumored to be coming soon). The Sociable.es widget appears very similar to the Google widget, and again you can actually do much more integration than what’s demonstrated there. Basically, the widget records who has visited based on an opt-in login. One feature of the Sociable.es implementation that you might find this entertaining is the very recognizable “invite your friends” page. So now, your visitors can invite their friends to your site. This may make you cringe or make you smile.

The only difference between the two: Google is a little bit more advanced in that you can drag and drop some scripts into your site and get more functionality more quickly, but it’s a little bit buggier, from what I’ve read. “Facebook Connect” is primarily just a re-branding of “Facebook App”, capabilities that have been around for a long. Also, they’ve smoothed out the sign-in process. However, you could have faked this using all the Facebook APIs that have been around for the last year and a half or so.

Why would you implement either of these? First of all, it makes it easier for your users to sign in. Whichever service you use, it’s going to give you a lot of user profile data without them ever having entered it on your site. Users just approved that your site has access to their data. Undoubtedly, there will be Web analytics tools shortly to let you track exactly who visits your site, how often, with details of their gender, age, and nationality.

Also, implementing Facebook or Friend Connect potentially makes your site more viral due to the invite and news feed features. Rather than a “Share This” button, you can have an invite your friends button that could share your product or re-post or anything on your website to a social network news feed. Additionally, there will be lots of developer tools that come out that allow you to supplement your existing website with social features like questions, comments, ratings, with pre-built code either from Facebook, Google or third-party developers.

These are exciting services for users and site owners because they allow for non-anonymous Web surfing. From Google and Facebook’s perspective, the more sites that implement these services, the more user identities they will own accross the internet. It is something that Yahoo’s MyBlogLog and Microsoft’s Passport have tried before, but potential with the new services is greater because they are easier to implement, and give access to more data.

Can Google Search Wiki help my site’s rank in search results?

adam — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:33:29 +0000

The short answer is: not yet, but you need to play with it anyway. Google Search Wiki is a huge new feature from Google. It lets you re-rank the results you get from a Google Search to your own liking. These changes are not normally visible to other users (yet) but they can click a link “See all notes for this SearchWiki” at the bottom of each Google search page to see all re-rankings for that particular search.

Long term this has huge ramifications as it makes Google search results more socially malleable. You should actively rank your sites to the top for all the search terms you care about now so that as more people discover this feature, they will see your sites and comments for their searches. You should see very small short-term gains in traffic if you hit major keyword searches.

What’s up with Google Friend Connect?

adam — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:26:55 +0000

I hope they hurry up and get this launched, it is going to be cool.

“Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. This means means more people engaging more deeply with your website — and with each other. In this video, Google Product Marketing Manager Mendel Chuang gives a short introduction to Google Friend Connect.”

- Tame The Web Blog Archive Google Friend Connect via PageRush

New Keyword Tool From Google

adam — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:08:08 +0000

Google has just released a new Search-Based Keyword Tool. It goes beyond the existing keyword suggestion tool. The intent here is to give advertisers more words to buy ads for on Google. For publishers though, this is a great source of ideas for words to use when writing.

Google Custom Search implements On-Demand Indexing

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:24:47 +0000

This is an important new feature that makes Google Custom Search more useful. You can use Google CSE to provide your users with a way to search only a short list of sites.

On-Demand indexing allows anyone with a Google Custom Search Engine or Google Site Search to identify and tell us about new pages or recent site changes by submitting a Sitemap to our Webmaster Tools.

Google Custom Search: On-Demand Indexing for a fast-moving web

This is only really useful for large sites with a lot of content. I would argue that for small sites and blogs, the normal global Google search is the only way people are going to find you any way, and secondary searches on your site are pretty small secondary source of traffic. Lijit, which is a service organizing Google CSE for bloggers is pretty useless, IMHO. When developers have full API access to Google CSE, it becomes a lot more interesting. This would surely be something developers would pay for, as the only alternative currently is Yahoo BOSS.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

adam — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 06:21:00 +0000

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