Google Friend Connect - APIs

APIs

The Google Friend Connect APIs provide the following features to website owners:

• Integration of features through HTML or other markup languages.
• Customizing the appearance of Google Friend Connect to match their websites' styles and designs.
• Advertising and website content that are tailored to individual user profiles.
• To question content of user profiles.
• Integration with other third party sites and services.
• Integration of Google Friend Connect with registered users and website content.

Third-party sites are dynamically connected via these social-networking sites allowing them to contact users as and when they use the site. By acknowledging user profiles they can attempt to offer content of interest, based on the user's available profile. The third-party sites that interact with social connect services do this by adding HTML/JavaScript gadgets into their pages, allowing them to immediately change or add relevant content (through altering the HTML code). Google Friend Connect requires the approval of the website using it. It requires no knowledge of web programming and enables any website to offer social applications and content from Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk, Netlog and other social networks.

Twitter, YouTube and 30 social benchmarking sites have been added to Google Friend Connect since it began in 2008.

Multiple social gadgets are used to enable Friend Connect interaction. These include Social Bar, Comments, Ratings and Reviews, Featured Content, Interests' Poll, Recommendations, Events and Games. In June 2009 Google added ClackPoint as a gadget. ClackPoint mixes live text chat, conference calling and document sharing. Status icons in the gadget mean that users can see who is dialed in and who is talking, and can poke or mute themselves or each other and a shared notepad allows multiple users to edit instantaneously.

The Google Friend Connect community widget can be put into the sidebar or footer to promote an organisation or sites content. Similarly functioning widgets are BlogCatalog and Facebook Fan Pages.