Today, we're bringing Twitter and Friend Connect even closer together. Now you can join one of over nine million Google Friend Connect sites using your Twitter login. Once signed in, your Twitter profile will be automatically linked and you can tweet your new site membership, share discussions from the comments gadget, and invite your friends via Twitter.

Already using Google Friend Connect on your site? These features are live and users can start signing in and posting via Twitter today.

If you have a website and are interested in using Google Friend Connect, learn more at www.google.com/friendconnect.

Posted by James Reilly, Google Friend Connect Team

(Cross-posted with the Official Google 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 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.

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 Google Friend Connect, 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.

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.

Break the ice

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.

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.

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.

Personalize your website experience

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:

• Send custom newsletters: 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.
• Personalized content gadget: 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.
• Google ads: 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.

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:

If you'd like to see the new features in action, check out some of our partners' sites, like sfstation.com, metrolyrics.com, and pachakam.com.

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 www.google.com/friendconnect.

Update 11/15: Updated list of partners.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

We are excited to announce the release of the Google Friend Connect Plugin for Discuz! 7.0. This project is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/google-friend-connect-plugins/.

Google Friend Connect allows simple user authentication using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, or AIM. Instead of filling in yet another profile form, your users can connect to their existing identities, showing current profile pictures and information. The ability to easily integrate profiles increases user engagement and activity on Google Friend Connect enabled sites.

Google Friend Connect plugins are currently available for WordPress, phpBB and Drupal. Today, we're very pleased to announce a new plugin that will make it easy for webmasters to use Google Friend Connect on their Discuz! sites. Discuz! is one of the most popular forum platforms, so we think a lot of users and site-owners will benefit from this new tool.


Example page: after installing Google Friend Connect Plugin


Example page: user successfully logged into forum using Google Friend Connect Plugin

Features:

• Based on the latest release of Discuz! (Discuz! 7.0).


• Multi-language support: English, Simplified Chinese(UTF8, GBK) and Traditional Chinese(UTF8, BIG5).


• Support for various templates in Discuz!. Even if you use your own customized templates, it will not require extra effort to install this plugin.


• Easy to install. Just download the plugin, upload it to your server directory, and edit the configuration files according to the installation instructions.


• Use Google Friend Connect profile information, such as your profile picture and your personal bio, in your Discuz! profile. The plugin can also propagate changes from your Google Friend Connect profile to Discuz!, keeping your information current.

To see the plugin in action, please visit the demo sites (in English and Chinese). If you are a Discuz! forum administrator, you can download the plugin as a zip archive and follow the instructions for installation to deploy it on your site. The code is open sourced under Apache License 2.0, and contributions are not only welcomed, but encouraged. This project hosts an issue tracker which will be populated with known issues and requested enhancements, so please use the tracker to report any new bugs or incompatibilities you find, or to request new features.

For more information, please check the user manual.

Posted by Xiaohui Lin, Jacky Wang, Sha-Mayn Teh, OpenSocial Team

This guest post was written by Mauro Gonzalez from Globant. - Ed.

I recently developed a plugin to add Google Friend Connect social features to WordPress blogs. This plugin allows your visitors to authenticate using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on your posts with no need to complete a registration form.


When a visitor authenticates as described above, a WordPress account is automatically created for them. You can later add or remove permissions for the visitor from the WordPress site administration pages. If desired, WordPress comments can be replaced by Google Friend Connect comments gadgets. In this case, no WordPress account is created, since Google Friend Connect handles both the rendering of the comments as well as comments moderation. Regardless of whether the Google Friend Connect comments gadgets are enabled or not, comment entries display the user profile picture and link to the user’s profile. In addition, a set of social gadgets are available, such as the Social Bar, Members, Recommendations, and Global Conversation gadgets. When recommendations are enabled, a "Recommend" button is displayed below your posts allowing the site members to choose the content they like most. The most popular posts will surface to the top of the list within the recommendations gadget.

The blog activities -such as posting content or commenting on a post- are submitted to the Google Friend Connect activity stream, which is visible on the social bar. All of the plugin features, as well as the color scheme, size, and labels of the social gadgets are easily configurable via admin panel, using regular WordPress admin interfaces. The plugin installation does not require any programming skills at all and you can get it at the Google Code site. To see this plugin in action visit either the WordPress with native comments demo or the WordPress with Friend Connect comments demo.

Posted by Mauro Gonzalez, Globant

This post is of a geeky nature, feel free to skip it if you're not wearing a propeller beanie. - Ed.

Those of you who have tried your hand with the developer side of Google Friend Connect might have seen The Chow Down application, a sample website that demonstrates how Google Friend Connect can be cleanly integrated into a website with an existing login mechanism. Today, we are glad to announce that this sample is now available in two more languages: C# and PHP. Both the samples have been kept as similar to the original Python sample as possible.

The C# version of The Chow Down has been developed as an ASP.NET website and is compatible with the Mono environment. The latest stable release of its source code is available for download. You may also obtain the source code from the repository.

The PHP release is also available for download and its source code can be found in the repository as well. The PHP version uses the OpenSocial PHP client library to connect to Google Friend Connect.

The source code for both samples are freely available for use under the Apache 2 license.

We hope you like these samples and use them as reference to integrate Google Friend Connect with your websites. Feel free to discuss these samples on the developer mailing list.

Posted by Anash P. Oommen, Google Developer Relations

Normally when we misplace files here at the Googleplex, we ask our best engineers to get them back. But today, we've gotten rid of a few files on purpose, and we're happy to see them go!

Today, we're making it even easier to get started with Google Friend Connect. We've heard from a number of you that uploading files to activate your website is not always easy. So starting today, you no longer have to worry about downloading or uploading files. Setting up a new website just involves entering your site's name and URL upon logging into www.google.com/friendconnect.

Additionally, we've updated the "canvas mode" that's used inside gadgets. So now, when you click the zoom icon in the upper right corner of some gadgets, you'll see a lightbox that displays the gadgets' contents, instead of being taken to a new webpage.

To get started with Google Friend Connect, visit www.google.com/friendconnect.

Posted by Jonathan Terleski, UI Designer, Google Friend Connect

This guest post was written by Arunoda Susiripala, who is an undergraduate student at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. He stepped into web development 2 years ago and developed the JConnect Integration Engine as part of the Google Summer of Code 2009. In his spare time, he enjoys playing rugby and watching comedies. - Ed.

Google Friend Connect provides a novel way to integrate social features onto any web page and is great for interacting with people from around the web. One of my favorite features is its ability to allow people to log in to websites with existing accounts.

That's why I decided to look into integrating Google Friend Connect with Elgg. Elgg is the best open source social networking platform available, but it's users have difficulty with attracting people to their Elgg sites/communities and getting them to register. So they often also try to provide people with some other means to login, whether it was OpenID, Facebook, or something else.

Once I learned about Friend Connect, I knew it could do more than the other options because it allowed people to log in to sites with accounts from many different services, such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and OpenID. So I started to develop a plugin to integrate the backend of Elgg with Friend Connect so that people could log in with these accounts. It worked really well and I was able to get it to pass the user's name and image from Friend Connect to Elgg. I also integrated the Friend Connect social bar with the plugin so users can easily enable or disable it.

The integration with Friend Connect was very easy compared to the integration of other services and only required a minimal amount of work. The three steps I took to integrate Elgg with Friend Connect were:

1. Use the JavaScript API to let people log in with Friend Connect
2. Use the cookie stored by Friend Connect to get information using the REST API
3. Then do the Elgg logic with the obtained information

This Elgg plugin is in its alpha state and needs further improvement. I also plan to add more features and more gadgets. So go try it out on the demo site and let me know what you think. I hope this plugin will help to make the web more social.

Posted by Arunoda Susiripala, Web Developer