One of the newest sidebar baubles that is showing up in blog sidebars is a new Google Friend Connect widget. I first really saw it in action after Duncan over at The Inquisitr was lucky enough to be among the early users of it. Now I didn’t think that WinExtra would be high enough profile to warrant being included in the beta run of Google’s Friend connect but I figured what the hell and applied anyway.
That was a few days ago and I had pretty well forgotten about it until I got an email this afternoon letting be know I’d been accepted and to go get my code. Needless to say I promptly headed off to the supplied link like a good little blogger with a new toy to play with. With the code all in place you can now join WinExtra as a “friend”, just look for the Friend Connect widget in the sidebar to the right..
Some early thoughts
Uhm … now what?
Really … other than letting you have the avatars of people who have joined as friends of the site what is this bringing to the table for bloggers? I’ve been hearing terms like viral and other such buzzwords about how this will help spread the word about a blog; but I’m not sure how this is suppose to happen.
On the Friend Connect site where bloggers manage their account there are a bunch of other widgets that we can add to the sidebar. While these widgets let members leave comments, rate the site or posts I think that this will probably benefit Google in the end – but time will tell I guess.
As for those extra widgets – I think I’ll hold off until either there are actual site members to uses them or someone can give me some good examples on how they’ll help. If you are curious about Friend Connect for blogs here’s a short video from Google
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Yes we can already leave comments on your blog…I'm waiting to see what the 'viral' features are before I add it. Although it might be smart to add it now and build an audience to see what you can do with them. Time will tell.
Yes we can already leave comments on your blog…I'm waiting to see what the 'viral' features are before I add it. Although it might be smart to add it now and build an audience to see what you can do with them. Time will tell.
I only have one of the available widgets in place for now but I am keeping an eye on the idea to see if it is a benefit. Like you said – time will tell.
I only have one of the available widgets in place for now but I am keeping an eye on the idea to see if it is a benefit. Like you said – time will tell.
[...] using the MyBlogLog tools and it will track some statistics for you as well. Steven Hodson had an excellent perspective on the new widgets: Uhm … now what? Really … other than letting you have the avatars of people [...]