Want to meet other people using Google and open web technologies to make the web more social? Then come to Google I/O on May 27 & 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California. Google I/O is a developer gathering focused on pushing the boundaries of web applications with these tools. Google engineers and web development leaders will lead you through two days full of in-depth breakout sessions on the latest technologies, and informal Q&A at Fireside Chats. There will be several sessions of particular interest to those readers of this blog, including Building a Business with Social Apps, Google and the Social Web, Make Your Website More Social, and Designing OpenSocial Apps for Speed and Scale. Members of the Google Friend Connect team and the OpenSocial team will be on hand to answer your questions. So if you're in the area or need a reason to visit, go register now.

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

Lots of websites ask you to invite your friends when you sign up, and for good reason; the web is more fun when you can share your experiences with other people. However, too many of these sites access your list of friends by asking for your username and password so they can sign in as you and scrape your contact lists. The problem is that once a website has your password, it can access all sorts of data, not just your contacts.

Portable Contacts to the rescue! Portable Contacts (affectionately known as "PoCo") is an open standard that aims to make it easier to access "who-you-know" information in a secure way -- this means sites don't have to employ the "password anti-pattern" of scraping websites.

Using PoCo is 'easy' to use because it builds on existing standards and libraries. In fact, PoCo uses the same data format as the OpenSocial REST protocol. The 'secure' part is provided by OAuth, an authentication mechanism that allows users to grant access to only certain sets of data (address books in this case).

Web developers can now access Google Contacts using the OAuth and Portable Contacts standards. To test this out, you first need to Register your Domain and get an OAuth key. Then you can use Plaxo's Portable Contacts test client to send some test queries. Just enter your OAuth key, hit the "Grant Access" button to authorize access to your Google Contacts, and start submitting queries to see PoCo in action. For more information, check out the Portable Contacts Developer's Guide on code.google.com or visit portablecontacts.net.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team

When you have questions about using Google Friend Connect, the first place to look is our Help Center. Here you can learn more about topics such as setting up your site, adding social gadgets, and the difference between a friend and a member.

For the questions that aren't answered in our Help Center, many of you have been using our Help Forum. We've been looking for ways to improve the usefulness of this forum, and we're excited to announce that we've now moved it to a new platform to provide more features!

With the new Google Friend Connect Help Forum, it is now easier to find and answer questions. Similar to the Help Center, questions in the Help Forum can be placed into one of two categories -- for site owners or for site visitors.

To identify our most active Help Forum participants, we have added a system of levels, with especially helpful forum members designated as "Top Contributors." For a personal touch, add a picture next to your name in the profiles. You can also subscribe to the forum (or to individual discussions) by RSS feed, post a question and receive your answer by email, and even vote on the best responses to particular questions.

If you have any questions or would like to help out by posting answers to other peoples' questions, visit the new Google Friend Connect Help Forum.

Posted by Karl Gusner, Google Friend Connect Team

While it's always been easy to add social features to your site with Google Friend Connect, it just got a little more flexible with the introduction of the Friend Connect API. This API lets you access the core features of Friend Connect to use them on your site in interesting ways.

Friend Connect lets you instantly awaken and strengthen the community that visits your website in way that is easy (just copy-and-paste some code) and open (we use OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial). The combination of ease and openness puts you and your visitors in full control of your social information, activities, and relationships throughout the web.
Whether you're a site owner or developer, the new Friend Connect APIs offer something for anyone who is interested in helping the web become more social:

• Site owners - Integrate Friend Connect more deeply into your site. JavaScript APIs allow you to integrate a social community directly within the markup of your page, and our REST APIs allow you integrate existing login systems and your existing data with new social data and activities. These are your visitors and this is your site, so you should be able to add social features the way you want.
  
• Plugin developers - Make plugins to integrate with popular content management systems, bulletin boards, or any open framework. To get you started, we have created open source plugin samples for WordPress, Drupal, and phpBB.
  
• Gadget developers - Make OpenSocial applications with greater control over how data flows across servers with signed requests. Use server-side authentication mechanisms so that a site with Friend Connect can act as an OpenSocial container.

To start using this API, set up your site at google.com/friendconnect and then click on the "For developers" link to get the snippets.


We're excited to see the creative ways you find to use this API to enrich the social web. To learn more, check out the documentation on Google Code or the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

Colby Ranger just posted on the Official Google blog about Tip Jar an experiment powered by Google Moderator.


It's exciting to see the different ways that existing products can help bring new ideas to life. Google Moderator was originally designed to enable a dialog between audience members and speakers by letting the audience vote on the questions they care about most. Tip Jar takes that concept and applies it to tips -- the web community now has an easy way to submit and then rank cost-saving tips.

To use Google Moderator with your community, simply go to moderator.appspot.com, sign in to your Google Account and create a new series on whatever topic you want. You can ask for ideas, suggestions or offer to answer questions. The possible uses for Google Moderator are endless and we hope that you will think of fun new ways to use Google Moderator.

And don't forget to check out Tip Jar. We'll all be a bit richer for it.

Posted by Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager, Google Moderator

When Oliver (Olly) Hicks asked Google to be a technology partner for the Virgin Global Row, his attempt to be the first person to row solo around the world, he was looking for simple ways to share his experience with the world. We naturally thought of Google Earth to show his progress on a map, Blogger to help him write posts about his life on the boat, YouTube to share his videos, and Picasa Web Albums to publish his photos. But we also wanted to help foster a community for the people visiting Olly's website. That's when we turned to Google Friend Connect and Google Moderator.

Google Friend Connect provides a way for anyone to join the site and become part of Olly's multi-year journey. Visitors will be able to come to the site to consume the content, become a members of the site, and leave messages for Olly on the wall. In addition, they can become friends with other members who also share an interest in rowing and Olly's expedition.

To add another level of engagement, we incorporated Google Moderator into the site. This creates an easy way for visitors to ask Olly a question and vote on other questions that they find interesting. Clicking on the "Submit a question" button takes visitors to a list of questions all about the Virgin Global Row. Later on, Olly will be able to review these questions and answer them at his leisure.

By using these two products and making a few simple changes, this site went from a one-way communication to an engaging two-way discussion. Check out the Virgin Global Row and make your mark on this journey.

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