Posts Tagged ‘social bar’

The Google Friend Connect expirement ends

Today I turned the switch off for Google Friend Connect (something I turned on in February 2009). There is now no longer a social bar when you visit (though most of you read this site via RSS).

Google Friend Connect on Business TimesThere are a myriad reasons as to why I disabled it, but it generally boiled down to the fact that I never figured out how to fully use it. I thought it might be useful for blog readers to connect with each other, but thats what the comments are really for.

Running YSlow or Page Speed, the thing that slowed my blog down the most, seemed to be the Friend Connect social bar. This is expected, but for not providing anything additional, I decided to zap it.

The Business Times still has their Friend Connect enabled, but its not the social bar – they’ve preferred going to using the members gadget. Currently, they have 1,327 folk who are members, while 7,051 people like their Facebook page more. I’m thinking more sites will find that a Facebook widget will benefit more in terms of user engagement.

I thought about utilizing Friend Connect to email newsletters to my “fans”. And while there is newsletter support, only about 10% of the people on my site have opted in to receive a newsletter (to be fair, I never did encourage anyone to signup for a newsletter – and this feature was not around before, as far as I remember). That’s a pretty poor conversion rate. There does not seem to be any other way to connect to members – no way to email them.

I also tried this on another website, a community for fashionistas in Malaysia. It was removed rather quickly, because chatboxes are still preferred, in comparison to Friend Connect!

And then there was the other thing… When I loaded up the blog on my iPad, the Friend Connect social bar would stick on the screen. Did not seem very UI friendly, and I had no intention of fixing it.

I’ve not seen Google put much effort behind Friend Connect any longer, and they seem to have other foci when it comes to being social on the Web. Even during their recent DevFest’s, the whole Friend Connect topic seems to have gone silent.

Thanks to all of you that joined the community, made comments, etc. Goodbye Google Friend Connect.

Google Friend Connect, revisited

About a month ago, I decided to try Google Friend Connect and their Social Bar. I still haven’t figured out its use fully yet, but maybe its there for keeping my readers connected to each other?


Is this what Google Friend Connect is for?

A modest number of folk have joined, but today I noticed them becoming friends. Win?

Its good to see that Business Times in Malaysia has something similar. All this is the work of @kedai. Lots of members, but no conversation yet, so it proves that there’s not much great use of it yet. I notice that there is a “Like!” activity (look at this for example), which then gets shared in the stream (not a comment but it says “username liked article”). This is again something kedai wrote, which is a very simple activity.

He, like I, wants to know how else you can socialise a site?

Update: Robert Scoble speaks to Kevin Marks about this, and the video itself is pretty interesting. There’s also a little discussion happening on FriendFeed.

Google Friend Connect and the Social bar

I decided to experiment with Google Friend Connect today, after seeing the “Social bar” being used on the Open Source Bridge site. I had even set aside some time to start writing some code; to my surprise, Google did all the magic for me, and it didn’t even take me longer than five minutes to setup.

It was as simple as setting up a new site, uploading two files into ~/www/, then editing my WordPress theme’s footer.php and adding the auto-generated code before the </body> tag (I did it after the <?php wp_footer(); ?> call though).

I immediately joined my own site. At first, I setup a profile, but then realised that I could import my profile from my usual Google one. Heck, I could even import a profile from Twitter! One thing I found odd, was that to edit my profile, I had to do it from the social bar itself (from the far left column).


Social bar
The social bar – click for a larger version

On the far left column, you can join the site, or edit your profile and settings. Next to that, you can see the activity stream throughout the site. Next to that, you’re given the option to add comments. And on the far right, you can see like-minded visitors who’ve joined, and even become friends with them.

What does the social bar do for me?

  1. It allows members to join my blog and be part of my community. Do you remember MyBlogLog (a Yahoo! service)? Well, Friend Connect allows me to have MyBlogLog type features, with no problem whatsoever.
  2. It allows comments from members. These can be fine grained comments – either for the particular page, or for the whole site. In my experimentation, I’m using it for the whole site naturally. On a blog, if you’re going to write a comment of substance, you’re going to do it with the commenting facility available on the blog – however, if you just want to write throwaway comments, one-liners, “me too” replies or have one of those “chatboxes” that blogs tend to have, you’ll find the Friend Connect Social Bar to be quite useful.

I’ll be the first to admit, that its probably not too useful for me, per se, but I can see its usefulness for sites that require a lot of collaboration.

Sites that I think can benefit from Friend Connect? Kenny Sia – the Chatterbox can be replaced with the comments in Friend Connect, and frankly all the one-liner comments will be better suited for the Social bar’s comments (maybe on a per-page basis?) – plus, he’ll get a “community” for free. LiewCF can also benefit – the “members” feature provided by MyBlogLog (he currently boasts 1,441 members) can probably grow with Friend Connect, and all those one-liner comments again, can go into the comments of the Social bar. Not picking on either site, but I think they can “socialise” their sites a lot better.


Colin Charles Agenda - Settings

MyBlogLog is kind of a walled garden. You need to have an account there (on Yahoo!). Friend Connect tends to be a bit more useful – you can either use a Google, AIM, Yahoo! or OpenID account to login (a lot of bloggers will already realise they have OpenID for free – wordpress.com, livejournal, et al provide this). I think it can be a bit more useful if it supported logins from Windows Live/MSN accounts too – after all, a large proportion of my non-geek friends are MSN users.

And if I join another community, that information is cross-pollinated to my other communities. As a site owner, you can even see “reports” of how social your site is, over time – this whole idea of data mining (ok, analytics) is highly useful.

What if you decided to use comments on your blog, for just that – comments. But use the Social bar to enter “blog suggestions”. Smells like Skribit, to some extent. Do I see myself keeping the Friend Connect Social bar at the bottom of my blog for long? Who’s to say. Let’s see if a community builds up around it. I think this will be most useful for sites that really want conversations amongst readers, something like the foss.my site, or other social sites.

Are you using Google Friend Connect? How? What are your thoughts on it? Don’t hesitate to share them in the comments (or via the Friend Connect Social Bar!).


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