So you might have noticed the box to the top right of this post with some friend avatars in it. I signed up to be whitelisted as a google friend connect beta tester and then as usual when signing up for these types of things forgot all about it. Google sent me a notification a few days ago that my request had been accepted so I went through the motions of checking out what they had to offer.
To be honest I’m not very impressed although I suppose things are still in development, the features available are currently not very usable. For example the widget I used in this site, which allows friends to connect with me on my site and invite others to do so, only allows me to see one or 2 profile links and doesn’t really allow me much interaction with the person who signed up as my friend. Maybe someone needs to develop a wordpress-friendconnect plugin to integrate some of the functionality.
I admit I haven’t spent an awful amount of time going through the limited documentation, but so far it seems very raw and nothing to write home about, though I do love getting some additional little functional elements to play around with and spice up my site with.
We’ll see what the community comes up with once the serious developers start throwing their social dev weight at this thing. As a non-hardcore-developer I can only but wait for now and throw in my 2 cents worth. How about you register as a friend and tell me if you found the process easy or valuable at all.
The promise of Open Social seems to be working it’s way towards something but I don’t think it’s fully arrived yet. Next I think we’ll try Facebook connect and see how it compares.
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