Google Friend Connect, now more personalized

<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(Cross-posted with the </span></span><a href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/11/google-friend-connect-now-more.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Social Web Blog</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">)</span></span><br /><br />On the subway, I bump elbows with a guy for 20 city blocks without exchanging a single word. Forty-five minutes later, I find the same guy at the local guitar shop, and we start to talk — turns out he plays a Gibson Les Paul just like I do. We may have been strangers on the train, but in the guitar shop, we discover our shared passion for guitars.<br /><br />Often, the web can feel like that subway. There are probably people commuting to the places you regularly visit, but you don’t know who those people are, and your paths may never cross. With <a href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect/">Google Friend Connect</a>, we've been helping millions of website owners make their sites more like that guitar shop — a social place where visitors can get to know each other — and less like the anonymous subway ride.<br /><br />With this in mind, we're thrilled to introduce a new set of Friend Connect features that let site owners help their visitors get to know each other and personalize their site's experience and content.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Break the ice</span><br />Visitors to your site can get to know each other better by sharing details about themselves that are relevant to the site they're on. As a site owner, you can help them do this by visiting the new "Interests" section of your Friend Connect account, where you can add site-relevant questions that people can answer when joining your website or via the poll gadget. For instance, if you have a music website, you might ask people to share their favorite bands, the last concert they attended, or where they discover new music. Or if you run a hiking site, you can ask them about a favorite hike or national park. The details people share are added to their Friend Connect public profiles for your site, which are seen by other site visitors. This way, your visitors can learn more about each other in the context of the interests that bring them to your website.<br /><br />We've also added the ability for people to send private messages to each other. That way, when a user discovers someone who shares their interests, they can send a message to that person via their Friend Connect profile to start a dialogue.<br /><br />And as with any data you collect on Friend Connect, you can use open export tools and APIs to integrate this information with any other systems you might use. The interests people share on your website are also made available in the new "Community data" section of your account in the form of easy-to-read charts.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Personalize your website experience</span><br />The ice-breaking isn't limited to your visitors; you'll learn more about them too. The interests people share make it possible for you to create a more personalized experience on your website in a number of ways:<br /><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Send custom newsletters</span>: The new "Newsletter" section of your account lets you create, send and manage newsletters. And with the help of "Interests," you can either send out newsletters to all your subscribers, or send out custom newsletters to different segments of your subscribers, based on the interest responses they submit.</li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Personalized content gadget</span>: This new Friend Connect gadget automatically presents a dynamic personalized set of links to your site's content that matches each visitor's specific interests. Is a visitor learning how to play swing music? Links to articles your site has published about playing swing are presented to him or her.</li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Google ads</span>: For those of you who display ads on your website, your Friend Connect account now includes an "AdSense" section that lets you enable Google ad units that are matched both to your site's content and to the interests users publicly share on your website. </li></ul>All these new features are easy to implement and require no coding whatsoever. Here's a quick tour of what Friend Connect now has to offer:<br /><br /><object height="295" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NlKEWHcW5QE&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NlKEWHcW5QE&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object><br /><br />If you'd like to see the new features in action, check out some of our partners' sites, like <a href="http://www.sfstation.com/">sfstation.com</a>, <a href="http://www.metrolyrics.com/party-in-the-usa-lyrics-miley-cyrus.html">metrolyrics.com</a> and <a href="http://www.pachakam.com/">pachakam.com</a>.<br /><br />We're excited to see the web evolve into a place where visitors of all websites can get to know each other — to share and discuss the things they care about most. To get started with Friend Connect, visit <a href="http://google.com/friendconnect">http://google.com/friendconnect</a>.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Update 11/15</span></span>: Updated list of partners. <br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect</span></div>

Google Friend Connect, now more personalized

(Cross-posted with the Social Web Blog)On the subway, I bump elbows with a guy for 20 city blocks without exchanging a single word. Forty-five minutes later, I find the same guy at the local guitar sh…

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Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend's New York blog!

Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn't always very easy to find in one simple place. That's why today we're rolling out a new <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental/">experiment on Google Labs</a> called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. It should be available for everyone to try by the end of the day, so be sure to check back.<br /><br />A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend's New York blog probably isn't going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I'll find are some well-known and official sites. We've taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/personally-speaking.html">personalization</a>, but today's launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend's blog on the results page under the heading "Results from people in your social circle for New York." I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking "Show options" on the results page and clicking "Social." Check out this video for a demo:<br /><br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZqWJxgp-_mU&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZqWJxgp-_mU&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object><br /><br />All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we've done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you're following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we'll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we'll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.<br /><br />To learn more about how Social Search works behind the scenes, including the choices and control you have over the content you see and share, read our <a href="http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228">help center article</a> or watch this video:<br /><br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/BlpTjP6h6Ms&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/BlpTjP6h6Ms&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object><br /><br />This feature is an experiment, but we've been using it at Google and the results have been exciting. We'd love to hear your <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=5818e141dc58c2bd&hl=en">feedback</a>. Oh, and don't forget to <a href="http://www.google.com/profiles">create a public Google profile</a> to expand your social circle and more easily find the information you're looking for (including that New York blog).<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead and Murali Viswanathan, Product Manager</span>

Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend's New York blog!

Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and t…

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I scream, you scream, we all scream for iGoogle social!

We launched iGoogle in 2005 as a way for people to quickly and easily personalize their Google experience with all the information on the web that was most useful to them. Now tens of millions of people choose to use their iGoogle homepage to check email, track the news, watch videos, chat with friends and much more. Today, we're pleased to tell you about the new social features that we're introducing to iGoogle.<br /><br />First, we're excited to introduce <a href="http://www.google.com/igsocial">social gadgets for iGoogle</a>. Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we're debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun. If you're a gaming fanatic, compete with others in <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=static.playfish.com/game/brain/igoogle/igoogle_brain_game.xml">Who has the biggest brain?</a> or challenge your fellow <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=ig.hosted.chesscomapps.com/api/gadget_def.php">Chess</a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=webmayhem.eamobile.com/mayhem/scrabble/igoogle/gadget.xml">Scrabble</a> enthusiasts to a quick match. Stay tuned in to the latest buzz with media-sharing gadgets from <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/npr.xml">NPR</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?type=gadgets&url=www.huffingtonpost.com/igoogle/widget.xml">The Huffington Post</a>, and <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=www.google.com/ig/modules/youtube_igoogle/v2/youtube.xml">YouTube</a>. To manage your day-to-day more efficiently, check things off alongside your friends with the social <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=www.labpixies.com%2Fcampaigns%2Ftodo%2Ftodo.xml">To-Do</a> list gadget.<br /><br />Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their homepages, or through a new feed called Updates. Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more. To help you manage who you are sharing with, we've created a Friends group. You can add and edit friends in this group at any time. If you already have a Friends group within your <a href="http://www.google.com.au/contacts">Google Contacts</a>, you'll be able to easily share with those friends on iGoogle as well. If you don't care to share, iGoogle's social features are optional and can be disabled on a gadget-to-gadget basis with just a few clicks.<br /><br />It's developers who have really made iGoogle into the rich experience it is — growing our gadget directory to over 60,000 gadgets today — and we know iGoogle developers will help us quickly expand our collection of social gadgets. You can get information about how to build social gadgets for iGoogle on our developer site: <a href="http://code.google.com/igoogle">code.google.com/igoogle</a>.<br /><br />We introduced these new social features recently to Australia users and are gradually rolling them out to users in the U.S. over the next week. Don't fret if you don't see your iGoogle page updated yet — just check back soon. The Google homepage has always been a place that connects people to information, and we're excited to now also be a place that connects people to each other. We hope these <a href="http://www.google.com/igsocial">social gadgets</a> make iGoogle an even more fun and personal homepage for you. You can learn more by checking out the video below.<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/D4AXFZWZ6nI&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/D4AXFZWZ6nI&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience and Rose Yao, iGoogle Product Manager</span>

I scream, you scream, we all scream for iGoogle social!

We launched iGoogle in 2005 as a way for people to quickly and easily personalize their Google experience with all the information on the web that was most useful to them. Now tens of millions of peop…

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Google Friend Connect speaks more languages

We know that there are millions of sites using <a href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect/?utm_medium=et&utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-et-na-us-googleblog">Google Friend Connect</a> to build a community around their content and they come in a variety of languages. With site owners and visitors from all over the world, the integration of services like <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/netlog-integrates-with-google-friend.html">Netlog</a> and <a href="http://www.orkut.com/">orkut</a> and the worldwide adoption of <a href="http://www.opensocial.org/">OpenSocial</a>, supporting additional languages has been a priority for the team. Today, we're happy to announce that Friend Connect is now available in 47 new languages.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2pzG8tn3rC9yN6wUJJNUvZfCkXVV80jZVLdlL2R-JjNepMgdOCOZmm8J9ifS4NiW-sUyMJfW4y-kbzxf2F2ys2bD-7XwSVqfO5OFqkP_7tAnR7AE11n1r5T1xd88EZyveAiQxGHCbFrPN/s1600-h/i18n-blogImage.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358332030781329922" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2pzG8tn3rC9yN6wUJJNUvZfCkXVV80jZVLdlL2R-JjNepMgdOCOZmm8J9ifS4NiW-sUyMJfW4y-kbzxf2F2ys2bD-7XwSVqfO5OFqkP_7tAnR7AE11n1r5T1xd88EZyveAiQxGHCbFrPN/s320/i18n-blogImage.png" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 318px; height: 320px;" /></a>This means you'll start seeing Friend Connect gadgets in languages such as French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Portuguese. Site owners simply set the language of their site and Friend Connect will automatically render the gadgets in that language.<br /><br />To learn more about this and other recent improvements to Friend Connect, visit our <a href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/07/friend-connect-goes-international.html">Social Web Blog</a>.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect</span>

Google Friend Connect speaks more languages

We know that there are millions of sites using Google Friend Connect to build a community around their content and they come in a variety of languages. With site owners and visitors from all over the …

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All for Good: Bringing search, scale and openness to community service

While many organizations are doing great work to enable community service locally, it's not simple to search across opportunities from a variety of places to find what's right for you. We have some experience finding relevant information from among many scattered sources, and when we learned that President Obama and the First Lady were making community service <a href="http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1872152,00.html?iid=fb_share">a top priority even before taking office</a>, we thought we could help make a difference.<br /><br />With our mission in mind, a group of <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/googles-20-percent-time-in-action.html">"20%" engineers, designers, and program managers</a> from Google and other tech companies began work on <a href="http://www.allforgood.org/">All for Good</a>, a new service to help you find volunteer events in your community, and share those events with your friends.<br /><br />All for Good provides a single search interface for volunteer activities across many major volunteering sites and organizations like <a href="http://www.liveunited.org/">United Way</a>, <a href="http://www.volunteermatch.org/">VolunteerMatch</a>, <a href="http://www.handsonnetwork.org/">HandsOn Network</a> and <a href="http://www.reachoutandread.org/about_find.html">Reach Out and Read</a>. By building on top of the amazing efforts of existing volunteer organizations like these, we hope to amplify their efforts.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA2WVFmZPobuFjacpLk0mito4oDevdpk_15F_a2GSzBfTXVDwlZL500HsiAQzgOuBOzJnV8MiVzRvLNpbfYGGh4-ukLsk8YexwCvqKpEcxQaVmDFmE-8KU39YuuOdPBvIjjFrNOrNA6wJX/s1600-h/afg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350174920223874754" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA2WVFmZPobuFjacpLk0mito4oDevdpk_15F_a2GSzBfTXVDwlZL500HsiAQzgOuBOzJnV8MiVzRvLNpbfYGGh4-ukLsk8YexwCvqKpEcxQaVmDFmE-8KU39YuuOdPBvIjjFrNOrNA6wJX/s400/afg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 228px;" /></a><br />And in the spirit of open data, All for Good has a data API that anyone can use to search the same data displayed on the All for Good site. All for Good was developed entirely using <a href="http://code.google.com/appengine/">App Engine</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/base/">Google Base</a>, with the full code repository hosted on <a href="http://code.google.com/hosting/">Google Code Hosting</a>. We'll be inviting developers to contribute to the open source application soon, so stay tuned.<br /><br />Just as releasing the Maps API led to an surge of independent and creative uses of geographic information, we've built All for Good as a platform to encourage innovation in volunteerism, as much as an end product in itself. We hope software developers will use the API or code to build their own volunteering applications, some even better than the All for Good site!<br /><br />And if you want to volunteer your video-creating skills to make a difference, check out <a href="http://www.youtube.com/videovolunteers">YouTube Video Volunteers</a>, a new platform designed to make connections between non-profits with video needs and skilled video makers who can help broadcast their causes through video.<br /><br />All for Good is a new kind of collaboration between the private, public and nonprofits sectors to build free and open technology to empower citizens. Similar to the Open Social Foundation, we helped create a new organization called Our Good Works to make sure that the API, the platform, and social innovation that they inspire are supported for the long term. The leadership includes Reid Hoffman, Chris DiBona, Arianna Huffington and Craig Newmark on the board, and the organization aims to build support volunteerism services like All for Good.<br /><br />Today the First Lady is in San Francisco calling on Americans to improve our communities by rolling up our sleeves and putting our time and talent towards doing good. You can learn more at <a href="http://serve.gov/">serve.gov</a>, where we're proud to power search.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Paul Rademacher and Adam Sah, Engineering Tech Leads</span>

All for Good: Bringing search, scale and openness to community service

While many organizations are doing great work to enable community service locally, it's not simple to search across opportunities from a variety of places to find what's right for you. We have some ex…

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Netlog integrates with Google Friend Connect

When we started building <a href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect/">Friend Connect</a>, we wanted to provide a fully open system — one that lets you join any website and interact with the people there in a meaningful way, regardless of where they come from. To enable this kind of engagement, we used open standards like <a href="http://openid.net/">OpenID</a>, <a href="http://oauth.net/">OAuth</a>, and <a href="http://www.opensocial.org/">OpenSocial</a> as underlying technologies, enabling any other service to plug into Friend Connect.<br /><br />Today, we're excited to share that <a href="http://www.netlog.com/">Netlog</a> has used these open standards to integrate their social networking service with Google Friend Connect. Now, Netlog's more than 45 million users across Europe can:<br /><ul><li>Sign into any of the millions of sites and blogs using Friend Connect with their Netlog credentials</li><li>Use their Netlog profiles on these sites</li><li>See if any of their friends are already members of the same sites and invite other Netlog friends to join</li><li>Share their Friend Connect activities with their friends on Netlog, and</li><li>Send messages back to their Netlog friends</li></ul>Additionally, for sites that are already using Friend Connect, one of the benefits of this standards based model is that they can take advantage of any new service that chooses to join this open ecosystem, like Netlog, without any additional work. The new network option simply appears.<br /><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqwxKAM7cRs1HJuyX2KmJjNIugJrJn8xr4whJ_e5dOLBu_4qhufqgjirEifz4DivG_0t4EqGLpoqsmkFjPnyys86HegUjDs0-hum9EFQhUTGgdvH8TTP3fGYQ4qGTfbuHyy9DNoBg2HAcV/s1600-h/blog_post_netlog.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5338341913176005730" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqwxKAM7cRs1HJuyX2KmJjNIugJrJn8xr4whJ_e5dOLBu_4qhufqgjirEifz4DivG_0t4EqGLpoqsmkFjPnyys86HegUjDs0-hum9EFQhUTGgdvH8TTP3fGYQ4qGTfbuHyy9DNoBg2HAcV/s400/blog_post_netlog.gif" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 361px; height: 333px;" /></a><br />Any social network or service, whether they are large or small, regional or global, niche or general audience, is welcome to take advantage of these open standards to integrate with Friend Connect, and participate in an open social web.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager</span></div>

Netlog integrates with Google Friend Connect

When we started building Friend Connect, we wanted to provide a fully open system — one that lets you join any website and interact with the people there in a meaningful way, regardless of where they …

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Strengthening a worldwide community with Google Friend Connect

Site owners often tell us that to build strong communities on the web, they have to be a jack-of-all-trades. With <a id="vvfc" href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect/" title="Google Friend Connect">Google Friend Connect</a>, we want to empower any website to awaken their community, even if the site owner doesn't have the technical background or the time to build social features from scratch.<br /><br />Today we're launching an enhanced comments gadget. With this gadget, visitors from all over the world can leave messages in their native tongue, and other viewers will be able to instantly translate these comments into the language of their choice. For websites like <a id="vd:7" href="http://www.earthhour.org/home/" title="Earth Hour">Earth Hour</a>, where people from many countries are working together to conserve energy, this comments gadget offers users a new way to engage in more meaningful discussions, regardless of what language they speak. Watch the video below to learn more:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4HQ81jgnvBQ&hl=es&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4HQ81jgnvBQ&hl=es&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />The comments gadget is just one way Friend Connect can help webmasters foster deeper interactions between site members. You may have seen that over the past few weeks we have added several new gadgets to the <a id="x62d" href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/gadgets" title="the Friend Connect gallery">Friend Connect gallery</a>, all with the goal of helping people interact with one another on the sites they enjoy. These gadgets include the <a id="lt68" href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/04/promote-your-event-with-new-gadget.html" title="the event gadget">event gadget</a> for promoting an upcoming event and letting members indicate if they're attending, as well as two gadgets built by OpenSocial developers: the <a id="i518" href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/04/making-polls-social.html" title="the Polls gadget">Polls gadget</a>, which gives opinion polls a social twist, and the <a id="l19x" href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/04/engage-your-community-with-get-answers.html" title="the Get Answers gadget">Get Answers gadget</a>, which lets members ask questions to the community and answer questions posted by others. <br /><br />To learn more about these gadgets, or to keep your eye out for future gadgets we will be rolling out for Friend Connect, please visit the <a id="kj6b" href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/" title="the Social Web blog">Social Web Blog</a>. <br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect</span>

Strengthening a worldwide community with Google Friend Connect

Site owners often tell us that to build strong communities on the web, they have to be a jack-of-all-trades. With Google Friend Connect, we want to empower any website to awaken their community, even …

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@Twitter: Welcome to Google Friend Connect

We know many of you enjoy using Twitter to see what people are talking about and to let others know what you've been up to, whether it's sharing a YouTube video or checking in on your friend's tweets. To help you and your Twitter network stay connected no matter where you are on the web, we're excited to announce that <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-friend-connect-now-available.html">Google Friend Connect</a> has integrated with Twitter. This means that when you join a friend connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_yAXb5w6eZhMMMA5JLXAcswCwNwDZ2c_vCCVWaH9bbmJ4YsExEknegIeWAS-ftFa8WPC9DJ6PTNuXU_LC7GiN4TAFJZcOy9_6WsBLx_Q7djOdRlvODckMjLPepZOtWJYTmDAcxlIO36ZC/s1600-h/twitter_blogpost_2.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279860864425133314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_yAXb5w6eZhMMMA5JLXAcswCwNwDZ2c_vCCVWaH9bbmJ4YsExEknegIeWAS-ftFa8WPC9DJ6PTNuXU_LC7GiN4TAFJZcOy9_6WsBLx_Q7djOdRlvODckMjLPepZOtWJYTmDAcxlIO36ZC/s400/twitter_blogpost_2.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 314px; height: 400px;" /></a><br /><br />To send a tweet about a site you have joined, click the invite link in the members gadget, then click the Twitter icon on the share tab. The next time your followers sign in to Twitter, they'll see your tweet containing a link to the interesting site you've found.<br /><br />This integration with Twitter is an example of how we want to continue improving Friend Connect, extending the open social web and bringing social features to more places on the web.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager</span>

@Twitter: Welcome to Google Friend Connect

We know many of you enjoy using Twitter to see what people are talking about and to let others know what you've been up to, whether it's sharing a YouTube video or checking in on your friend's tweets.…

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Google Friend Connect: now available

We're pleased to share that Google Friend Connect is now available in beta to any webmaster looking to add a "dash of social" to his or her site. This service lets webmasters add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code — no advanced coding or technical background required. <br /><br />We know that people want to be social on the web, and Friend Connect makes it easy for anyone to sign in to a website, share a little bit about themselves through a personal profile, discover other people with similar interests, invite their contacts, and interact with friends. Even better, you don't have to deal with the hassle of creating yet another username and password — Friend Connect lets you log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID. Similarly, you can choose to either establish a new profile or use profiles and friend sources from other social networks that have opened up their services, like Plaxo and orkut. To learn more, watch the video tour below:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/N94s7ix0JPo&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/N94s7ix0JPo&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />We launched Friend Connect as a <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/friend-connected-web.html">preview release in May</a>, and since then we have been working closely with a handful of website owners, social networks, and application developers to improve its speed and scalability, ease of use, and customization capabilities. We've also expanded the features available to users with richer, more integrated profiles and new ways to discuss and share content, like including YouTube videos in your comments.<br /><br />Friend Connect's goal is to facilitate an open social web. Using open standards like OpenID and OAuth, Friend Connect makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit. Additionally, websites that use Friend Connect become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community.<br /><br />In the coming months, we're excited to see more webmasters add Friend Connect to their sites, helping their visitors engage with each other across the web.<br /><br />To learn more, please visit <a href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect">www.google.com/friendconnect</a>.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager</span>

Google Friend Connect: now available

We're pleased to share that Google Friend Connect is now available in beta to any webmaster looking to add a "dash of social" to his or her site. This service lets webmasters add social features to t…

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The social web: All about the small stuff

<span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20at%2010">their responses</a>. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors</span><br /><br />What makes two friends feel "close" to one another? I'd argue that a big part of it is the small details that you know about each other. The funny comment your friend made about a billboard they saw while driving down the road, what they had for dinner, a person they ran into on the street, their comments about the movie they saw two nights before. Closeness often comes from knowing the small things, not just the big things. Distance makes knowing those small things harder. When you live together, either with your family or your friends, knowing the small things is easy. They get conveyed when passing in the hall, sitting down to a meal or just hanging out. It's effortless.<br /><br />When you live apart, things change. Suddenly it takes effort. It used to take a <i>lot </i>more effort when writing a letter was the primary way to communicate over distance as opposed to email or IM or telephone. But, even with our current technology, it still takes work. As a result, we share less with our friends. And when we do share, we tend to share the big stuff (big shifts at work, major family events like birthdays or school milestones) and leave the small stuff behind. We start to feel less connected because we don't know the details.<br /><br />The promise of the social web is about making it easy to share the small stuff -- to make it effortless and rebuild that feeling of connectedness that comes from knowing the details. My wife recently sent out a public Picasa Web Album of baby photos to ten of her friends. Four of them wrote back saying "I didn't know Joe got a new car?!" (her friends browsed through my other public photo albums). While she would never hesitate to share the big event (new baby), she never would have shared the small detail of me getting a new car. This kind of thing is repeated again and again. The small details are left out. A weekend with Grandma and Grandpa? Thinking about selling my house? Are these things all "worth" sharing? Maybe. Sometimes. For some people.<br /><br />Fortunately, as the web becomes more social, I won't have to spend as much energy thinking about what's "interesting enough" to share with a certain group. The people who care about me and that I allow will increasingly be able to tune in to the parts of my life that interest them.<br /><br />It will be great when the instant I think of something to tell my friends, or something I need from my friends, they're available to me in some way. Remember when Google embedded IM into Gmail, and you could suddenly see -- without changing applications -- that the friend you were about to email was online and easily reachable right at that second? That little green bubble of presence right in front of our eyes brought a little extra ping of closeness that email hadn't had until then. That was in 2006, at the start of the AJAX-powered wave of dynamic web apps. Now, many sites and services are adding even more sophisticated plumbing (like profiles and friends and presence and comments) that brings the immediacy of social interaction to more and more places on the web. Reaching your friends can be really active, as IM is today, or it can be passive, like changing your status message.<br /><br />In the coming decade, the web will become as effortlessly social as chatting with your family or roommates at home is today. Social features will be embedded and around and through all variety of spaces and places on the web. Sometimes you'll go to a place because you want to see your friends, and sometimes the place you're in will get better because you can bring your friends there. It will make it easier to strike up new relationships, new communities, new expressions of what your life is about. The web will connect people to the small moments that in many ways matter most.<br /><br />We're just now starting to navigate all the intersections between sociology and engineering on the web. We -- meaning Google and many others in the web community -- are in the midst of a burst of energy around all things social that is teaching us more every day about what people want to do with their friends and where. How does iGoogle or Gmail get more powerful when you've got your friends present in some new way? What is possible on mobile devices when you can put better data about you and your friends in your pocket? What are the big plumbing problems -- like contact portability, or standards for user authentication and authorization -- that need to be solved for the whole web because no one site can do it on its own?<br /><br />Google is chipping in on all of these fronts, listening closely to our users to make our existing products more social in useful ways, and by working with the web community on software projects like <a title="OpenSocial" href="http://www.opensocial.org/" id="jrpp">OpenSocial</a> and <a title="OAuth" href="http://code.google.com/p/oauth/" id="yqhz">OAuth</a> to address some of the big infrastructure challenges that are best solved in the open, with the perspective of many developers and website owners represented. Fast forward ten years, and you'll feel even more at home on the web than you do today - because it will be a pretty good reflection of you.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management</span>

The social web: All about the small stuff

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the en…

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Be who you want on the web pages you visit

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager</span><br /><br />A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions? I started asking this question as a 20% project, and I'm excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.<br /><br />The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web.<br /><br />If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”.<br /><br />Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop.<br /><br />To learn more about Lively, please visit <a title="www.lively.com" href="http://www.lively.com/" id="l:nq">www.lively.com</a>. We’re eager to hear <a href="http://www.lively.com/help/bin/request.py?contact_type=suggest">your feedback</a>. Maybe we'll bump into you in one of our rooms!<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5YbwfOucET8&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5YbwfOucET8&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Be who you want on the web pages you visit

Posted by Niniane Wang, Engineering ManagerA while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your so…

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A friend connected web

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager</span><br /><br />Have you ever wished you could share information and interact with friends while visiting some of your favorite websites? There are a number of great social networking sites out there that let you stay connected, but the rest of the web typically hasn't been social. Yet.<br /><br />Site owners have been saying for a while that they would love to provide this functionality, but, frankly, it's been too hard to add social features. A lot of code has to be written to create a site where visitors can sign up and bring their friends along, form new friendships, and do engaging things together. And not to mention that if you're a site visitor, it's pretty inconvenient to create a new account and try to rebuild a network of friends each time you visit a site.<br /><br />Enter <a href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect">Google Friend Connect</a>. This new service, announced as a preview release tonight at <a href="http://code.google.com/campfire/">Campfire One</a>, lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You'll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/talk/">Google Talk</a>, <a href="http://www.hi5.com/">hi5</a>, <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a>, <a href="http://www.orkut.com/">orkut</a>, <a href="http://www.plaxo.com/">Plaxo</a>, and others. And quite simply, you'll be able to do things together.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx1WRO1AjiLxHgcb1v1RFjcCTlva42PcXTA2iFna09-3IEyMd4RXiQubvsUkppYrVxWmtC3_wVTRecRA_sE15PYoMP20imDbctmWYyBO2odH7mb44wYbY9Ws0agvxziBtBo8wb0KLXMwR5/s1600-h/1_friend_connect_image.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5199737755096007378" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx1WRO1AjiLxHgcb1v1RFjcCTlva42PcXTA2iFna09-3IEyMd4RXiQubvsUkppYrVxWmtC3_wVTRecRA_sE15PYoMP20imDbctmWYyBO2odH7mb44wYbY9Ws0agvxziBtBo8wb0KLXMwR5/s400/1_friend_connect_image.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a>Having faces show up at a site is not enough. Friend Connect lets site owners include OpenSocial apps made by a world of developers. We're providing a few apps, such as posts and ratings, to get the ball rolling. And many more will be provided by the <a href="http://sites.google.com/a/opensocial.org/opensocial/Home">OpenSocial</a><a href="http://sites.google.com/a/opensocial.org/opensocial/Home"> community</a>.<br /><br />With this functionality, there's no end to the possibilities. A small site dedicated to mountain biking in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab">Moab</a>, for example, would be able to have members who could exchange maps, tips, and pictures of their latest rides. A stroke victims support site could help grieving family members assist one another by sharing advice. A politician's site could enable supporters to advocate their viewpoints. A musician's site could give fans the chance to interact full tilt with the band and one another.<br /><br />Take a look at a few white-listed sites using Google Friend Connect: <a href="http://www.ingridmichaelson.com/">Ingrid Michaelson's official website</a>, which includes the <a href="http://www.ilike.com/">iLike music application</a>, and <a href="http://www.bibleapps.com/">Bible Apps</a>, owned by an OpenSocial developer fully dedicated to his "Verses" application -- where people can post prayers and test their knowledge of the Bible as a quiz game with their friends.<br /><br />If you run a website and would like to add social features, you can now sign up for the wait list and learn more by visiting <a href="http://www.google.com/friendconnect">www.google.com/friendconnect</a>. We're going to keep things pretty limited at first so we can gather feedback from site owners, developers, and users, but, in the weeks ahead, we'll be reaching out to more site owners and adding more social apps to the gallery.<br /><br />You can also learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May 28-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at <a href="http://code.google.com/events/io/">http://code.google.com/events/io/</a>.

A friend connected web

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product ManagerHave you ever wished you could share information and interact with friends while visiting some of your favorite websites? There are a number of great social netw…

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OpenSocial continues to grow: Welcome, Yahoo!

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager</span><br /><br />Last November, <a title="OpenSocial was kicked off" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/opensocial-makes-web-better.html" id="acjj">OpenSocial was created</a> to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into many different social networks and extend their functionality. Sites including MySpace and orkut have begun to provide OpenSocial applications to their users, and hi5 will be rolling out next week.<br /><br />Today we're pleased that <a href="http://ycorpblog.com/2008/03/25/announcing-the-opensocial-foundation/">Yahoo! has announced its support for OpenSocial</a>. We're looking forward to having Yahoo! users join the hundreds of millions of people who will soon enjoy OpenSocial applications. This addition means even more distribution for developers, encourages participation by even more websites, and, most importantly, results in more features for users all across the web.<br /><br />In addition, Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google are joining with the broader community to create a non-profit foundation to foster the continued open development of OpenSocial. To that end, we've also launched <a href="http://www.opensocial.org/">OpenSocial.org</a>, designed to become the main documentation hub and primary source of information about OpenSocial. To learn more, and to get involved, please review the <a href="http://sites.google.com/a/opensocial.org/opensocial/OpenSocial-Foundation-Proposal">foundation proposal</a>.<br /><br />With that, welcome, Yahoo! We look forward to growing the social web together.

OpenSocial continues to grow: Welcome, Yahoo!

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product ManagerLast November, OpenSocial was created to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into …

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orkut going more social

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Amar Gandhi, orkut Group Product Manager</span><br /><br />Starting this month, we're enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We'll start ramping up to more than 50 million people over the next few weeks.<br /><br />To prepare for this growth, we're now accepting social applications. For a while now, developers have been able to write, test, and play with applications on orkut. Later this month, however, we're going to start rolling them out to orkut users. OpenSocial developers can <a href="http://orkut-app-submission.googlemashups.com/" id="hlvz" title="here">submit</a> their completed applications (deadline: Feb. 15).<br /><br />To help developers ready their applications, we're offering engineering support and training. We've scheduled <a href="http://www.google.com/calendar/event?eid=MWVtMjFiOWhibTRxMWpuczE4OHBvdjM3MWtfMjAwODAyMDdUMTkwMDAwWiBkZXZlbG9wZXItY2FsZW5kYXJAZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ&ctz=America/Los_Angeles" id="mwu5" title="Orkut Hackathons">orkut hackathons</a> on Feb. 14-15 from 10 am-6 pm at the Googleplex in Mountain View and via videoconference in New York. For more information or to RSVP, please email <a title="hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com" href="mailto:hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com" id="b7en">hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com</a>. If you can't attend, we hope to see you in the <a title="OpenSocial forums" href="http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-api/" id="tvy0">OpenSocial forums</a> or on chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial).

orkut going more social

Posted by Amar Gandhi, orkut Group Product ManagerStarting this month, we're enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We'll start ramping up to more than 50 mill…

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OpenSocial makes the web better

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management</span><br /><br />As the web goes, so goes Google, and that's why we care about making the web better. Five months ago, <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/gears_20070530.html" id="d4zo" title="we launched Google Gears">we launched Google Gears</a> to make the web better by making it work offline. Now, we want to make the web better by making it more social.<br /><br />A tremendous amount of activity is occurring on social networks these days. Hundreds of millions of people share photos, rate movies, and throw virtual sheep at one another. All these social networks are looking to give their communities more and more things to do -- and they realize they can't do it on their own. They need to open up and become platforms for developers to extend. So, many social networks have looked at, or launched, their own APIs that typically do the same kinds of things: give access to user profiles and friend networks, and allow an application to post activities so that everyone's circle of friends knows what the others are doing. All of this has been good news, because developers could get their applications onto a social network.<br /><br />But there's a problem: it wasn't one or two social networks doing this, but ten or fifteen. Now, to get on all the social networks a developer has had to customize their application for each one. When your "development team" is just one or two people, the proliferation of APIs forces you to make tough choices, because you can't do that much one-off work. Not only is this situation bad for developers, it's bad for consumers too: When developers can't afford to do the work to make their applications work on a certain social network, the people using those networks lose out.<br /><br />That's why today we're excited to introduce <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial">OpenSocial</a>, a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web. OpenSocial allows developers to write an application once that will run anywhere that supports the OpenSocial APIs.<br /><br />It's good for developers because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places. Global members of the OpenSocial community include <a href="http://www.myspace.com/" id="cgm8" title="MySpace">MySpace</a>, <a href="http://www.engage.com/e/home.htm" id="gw3_" title="Engage.com">Engage.com</a>, <a href="http://www.friendster.com/" id="h4nm" title="Friendster">Friendster</a>, <a href="http://www.hi5.com/" id="tibr" title="hi5">hi5</a>, <a title="Hyves" href="http://www.hyves.net/" id="hs9w">Hyves</a>, <a title="imeem" href="http://www.imeem.com/" id="npgx">imeem</a>, <a title="LinkedIn" href="http://www.linkedin.com/" id="uhyg">LinkedIn</a>, <a title="Ning" href="http://www.ning.com/" id="lh01">Ning</a>, <a title="Oracle" href="http://www.oracle.com/index.html" id="glfc">Oracle</a>, <a title="orkut," href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=orkut&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.orkut.com%2FRedirLogin.aspx%3Fmsg%3D0%26page%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.orkut.com%252F&hl=en-US&rm=false&passive=true" id="l_r5">orkut,</a> <a title="Plaxo" href="http://www.plaxo.com/info" id="tq3a">Plaxo</a>, <a title="Salesforce.com" href="http://www.salesforce.com/" id="yw13">Salesforce.com</a>, <a title="Six Apart" href="http://www.sixapart.com/" id="tu4y">Six Apart</a>, <a title="Tianji" href="http://www.tianji.com/index.html" id="igv.">Tianji</a>, <a title="Viadeo" href="http://www.viadeo.com/en/connexion/" id="y94f">Viadeo</a>, and <a title="XING" href="http://www.xing.com/" id="odbv">XING</a>.<br /><br />We were thrilled to see <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/partners.html">so many partners turn out</a> for our very first CampFire One event, a small gathering of developers at the Googleplex. They do the best job of explaining why they support this vision of an open, programmable web. And so in the spirit of being social, we want to share the video from tonight's event.<br /><br /><object height="366" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9KOEbAZJTTk&rel=1&border=0"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/9KOEbAZJTTk&rel=1&border=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="366" width="425"></embed></object>

OpenSocial makes the web better

Posted by Joe Kraus, Director of Product ManagementAs the web goes, so goes Google, and that's why we care about making the web better. Five months ago, we launched Google Gears to make the web better…

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SMS on orkut

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Pedram Keyani, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />While <a href="http://www.orkut.com/About.aspx">orkut</a> users love having an online social network, we understand that a good deal of your social life happens offline. We wanted orkut to enrich the offline social life of its members, so we thought we could either give you computers with really long cords or we could bring orkut to the device you carry around in your pocket: the mobile phone. Thus the idea for an orkut SMS service was born.<br /><br />With orkut's new SMS feature, you can <a href="http://help.orkut.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=10322">scrap</a> your friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications. Now you can send scraps from the bus, bar or bathroom, and your friends can get notified of those scraps when on bicycle, beach or bed. Along with the standard orkut features, we've included a few hidden goodies for the adventurous to find.<br /><br />This week, orkut SMS will become available to orkut members in Brazil who use Claro as their mobile service provider. When the feature becomes available to you, a message will be displayed when you sign in to your account. We hope to expand soon to other mobile service providers in Brazil and around the globe.<br /><br />So next time you want to scrap your friend Sergio about a party, just text message orkut with "scrap Sergio it's party time man!"

SMS on orkut

Posted by Pedram Keyani, Software EngineerWhile orkut users love having an online social network, we understand that a good deal of your social life happens offline. We wanted orkut to enrich the offl…

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