Since the introduction of the Following feature on Blogger, it has been adopted by nearly three million blogs, with someone following a new blog every second. Over the past few months, we’ve been striving to make it better, and now we're proud to announce the integration of Google Friend Connect and Blogger.

By building on Friend Connect technology, the Following feature can now tap into an open ecosystem. Visitors will be able to follow a blog using their Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account, just as they can on any other site with Friend Connect. These blogs will be listed in their profile alongside other sites they've joined. And it also leverages existing friend relationships, meaning they'll be able to quickly see if their friends also follow the blog.

Watch the video below to learn more:


If you're already using Friend Connect on your blog, like we do on this blog, you don't need to change anything. You can continue to use Friend Connect as you have in the past. And this is just the first step in the integration, so be sure to stay tuned for further improvements, including an easy way to add OpenSocial gadgets through Blogger and the integration of the commenting features. To learn more, visit Blogger Buzz.

One note for readers who previously followed one or more sites with Blogger Following and joined one or more sites with Friend Connect: you can decide whether or not to show the sites you've joined via Blogger Following and Google Friend Connect in your Blogger profile. By default, we have turned the "Show blogs I follow in my Blogger profile" option off. If you change your mind, here are instructions for making this list of sites public on your Blogger profile.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

You may have noticed that YouTube became more social a couple of months ago with the addition of the "Recent Activity" box to YouTube channels. Well, the YouTube API is now following suit by providing activity feeds for integration into other apps and sites. Before you ask, the API respects all privacy settings, so the user still has complete control over what does or does not appear in the feed.

For more details, check out the docs, sample code, and the full post over at the YouTube API Blog. Here are some additional resources:

• Protocol guide
• PHP guide
• Java guide
• Activity viewer sample in PHP (source)
  

We're excited to see what kind of cool apps can be made with these feeds. And if you want to meet us and thousands of other web developers, check out Google I/O that's happening in May. The YouTube API team will be hosting two sessions there, including one titled "Going social with the YouTube APIs."

Happy coding!

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

While it's easy to add social features to your site with Google Friend Connect, you may have been wondering where to put all of the great gadgets. You need your users to sign in, to interact with your site, and to find those like-minded strangers... but pixels are precious, and you're not sure how to make more space alongside the wonderful content that brought people to your site in the first place.


The Friend Connect Team is here to help. We're happy to announce a new feature: the social bar. The social bar concentrates many of the basic social functions into a small strip at the top or bottom of your webpage. You can use it to complement your existing gadgets and put it on as many or as few of your webpages as you want.

With the social bar, your visitors will be able to see crucial info at a glance and engage with social features through convenient drop-down gadgets.

• On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
  
• Your visitors can also delve into your site's activity stream to see what's happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place.
  
• The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments.
  
• Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends.
  

Watch the video below to learn how to add a social bar to your site.


You can also see the social bar in action on this example site that Mussie Shore created.

We hope your visitors (and your pixels) like the new social bar and will put it to good use.

Posted by Christopher Wren, Software Engineer, Google Friend Connect

We think the web is better when it's social. Currently, you have friends locked up in one or more social networks, social applications that work on only a few sites, and multiple usernames and passwords to remember. It can be better, and we are developing tools to make "any app, any site, any friends" a reality.

We are launching this blog for anyone interested or involved in helping to make the web more social. Whether you own a site and want to add social features to increase community engagement, or you're developing a great social application, this blog is for you.

We will write about social initiatives within Google, such as Google Friend Connect, as well as community efforts like OpenSocial. We plan to share some success stories, present tips and tricks, provide updates when there are new developments, and much more.

And we want to hear what you have to say. So join this site, leave a message on the wall, and add a song to the iLike playlist gadget. Tell us about what you've been doing to make the web more social, what you've seen others successfully do, or simply what you think about our posts. We look forward to hearing from you and keeping you updated on Google products that are helping the make the web more social.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect