framedsheep

Let us have a look at the introduction.

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social. But the barriers to offering social applications on the site have been considerable. Google Friend Connect changes this by enabling any site to 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.

Okay then, how about the benefits and features?

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Interesting, very interesting.

There’s a video that gives some examples as to how a website owner could integrate gadgets in to their website, beefing up interactivity opportunities and providing a simple way for people to connect online to other people who are also interested in the same website or even, a single page or even pages, on a website.

As you can see [or saw] in the demo video, it all looks rather easy. Maybe it will be a winner.

As with all innovations from Google, there just has to be some controversy, or the potential for it, which we can find over at Read Write Web, with thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick. Not everybody is applauding.

Later tonight Google will launch a new service called Friend Connect, aiming to “bring the social” to any page around the web. Unfortunately the service takes a bunch of open technical standards yearning to see the light of day through mass adoption and puts them in a dark little box where they will struggle to breathe.

Google could have worked with other large companies and with the creators of these standards (some are in the Data Portability Working Group that Google joined, for example) to tackle the hard questions around data exposure, integration and privacy. Instead they are pushing their Open Social standard around in an iframe. Easy is very good, but co-operation could have come up with something better than this.

The rest of the article can be found over here.

The way I see it, everything is a work in progress. This is one step forward for many and whether or not some people may see this as perfect or the best that can be done right now, it is at least something. Maybe less people should be hung up on throwing out how they feel things have to be, and rather looking for the silver lining and make the effort to contribute constructively, rather than bash deductively.

Just my small slice of the wisdom pie.