Last week you may have read on the YouTube blog that we launched YouTube RealTime, a persistent toolbar on YouTube which allows you to see which of your YouTube friends are currently online and what they're watching, a history of their recent activities on the site, and real-time notifications when they perform activities like commenting, favoriting, and uploading.


We launched it on an exclusive invite basis only and invited the first 100 people to write "Yes! Sign me up" in the comments section of the blog post. We saw lots of interest on the YouTube blog, so we wanted to share shared 25 more invitations with the readers of this blog. Therefore, if you want to test this cool new tool out, just write "Yes! Sign me up" along with your YouTube username in the comments section below and we'll add the first 25 respondents.

Please keep in mind that you will need to have friends on YouTube for this to work -- the more you have, the richer the experience, so be sure you accept friend invites and actively manage the list. Participants can enter feedback on RealTime in the forums.

Posted by Curtis Lee, YouTube Team

This guest post was written by Barry Welch, a social app developer and a speaker at the Google Friend Connect launch who likes to create apps that foster visitor interaction, increase website traffic, and/or generate revenue for site owners. Barry relies on Google App Engine to provide speed and scale for his web apps. - Ed.

If you're seeking to get your community more engaged, you'll want to give them more ways to connect with one another and contribute to your site. In addition to the other gadgets available through Google Friend Connect, there's now the Get Answers gadget. Adding the Get Answers gadget to your site will encourage visitors to ask questions of the community and answer questions posed by others, creating a clear invitation to interact.

For visitors looking to connect and contribute to your community, the Get Answers gadget lets site members
* Ask questions, submit answers, and vote on the answers they think are the best
* Read other questions and answers from the community, sorted by popularity or date
* Quickly view only their own questions to see the answers they've received
* See what Google search says about their question

With the Get Answers gadget, new members can ask questions and get up to speed quickly, current members can share information relevant to your site topic or other topics of interest to them, and you (the site owner) can learn more about the interests of your community, which can help you tailor your content to your visitors' needs. As the site owner, you remain in full control and can moderate the gadget by deleting any inappropriate questions or answers.

View a sample site using this gadget, or learn more about the Get Answers gadget and how to add it to your own site.

Posted by Barry Welch, Social App Developer

This guest post was written by Alex Epshteyn who is the founder of typeracer.com, a popular browser-based real-time typing tournament. He started developing for the OpenSocial platform over a year ago with the TypeRacer application for orkut and MySpace. Alex has been successfully leveraging Google developer tools such as Google Web Toolkit and App Engine to create compelling social applications such as TypeRacer and this Polls Gagdet. Alex holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from UMass Amherst and was an intern at Google in 2005. - Ed.

You've seen them on thousands of websites – opinion polls which ask you a question of interest and then show you the number of people who voted on each answer choice. If you're a webmaster, polls are a fun and easy way for your visitors to express themselves and a great tool for you to see what your users like.

Traditionally, all these votes have been condensed into a set of numbers and percentage bars, but the new Polls Gadget for Google Friend Connect is giving opinion polls a human face (literally). The Polls Gadget makes it easy to publish opinion polls on your friend connected website and adds a social element by displaying the faces of the community members and friends who voted on each answer.

Google Friend Connect makes poll results more accurate because votes are tied to each user's account, more interesting because you can see who voted on each answer, and, best of all, you can discover like minded members who have similar tastes! For instance, I just discovered that a member, Mussie, and I have the same favorite track on the new U2 album.


You can try the Polls Gadget for yourself and add it to your friend connected website free of charge. You will have full control over publishing polls on your site. In the future, we're planning to also give you the option of syndicating your polls across the web, letting other web masters host them on their site

The Polls Gadget was built using Google Web Toolkit for extra interface richness, Google App Engine for extra scalability, and OpenSocial, well, for all that social stuff.

Posted by Alex Epshteyn, Founder of typeracer.com

Google Calendar has always been a great tool for planning group events, and whether it's a concert by your favorite band or a new exhibit at your local museum, attending an event with people who share your passion for classic rock or modern art can make the experience all the more enjoyable. Today we're launching a new event gadget for Google Friend Connect that lets site owners spread the word about upcoming events that may be of interest to their communities.

Do you run a website about local biking trails? Use the event gadget to organize a group ride by posting a public event on your site. Members of your site can sign in and RSVP, and their responses will appear directly on the website. Visitors can see if any of their friends will be joining, and can add the event to their personal Google Calendars with just a click. To ensure that no one gets lost on the way, a Google Map showing the event's location is automatically embedded. Of course, that doesn't mean you should limit yourself to physical events -- host a virtual meet-up or "webinar" and share all of the important dial in codes through the event gadget.



Visit our sample site to try out the gadget for yourself or go to google.com/friendconnect to add one to your own site.

Posted by Yoah Bar-David, Software Engineer, Google Calendar

From time to time, we'd like to highlight some news from around the social web. In case you missed it, here are some stories that have crossed our radar:
- Change the Web Challenge - Social Actions is running a challenge to create widgets and web applications that help people connect to opportunities to make a difference all over the web. There are $10,000 in prizes, so go vote for your favorite Projects before 3:00 pm PDT today.
- 2009 Webware 100 - Google Friend Connect and the standards which power it (OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth) were nominated as finalists for the 2009 Webware 100 in the Infrastructure & Storage category. Voting ends on Thursday, April 30th.
- Gmail Labs gadgets now support OpenSocial - If you've been building social gadgets using OpenSocial APIs, you can now try making some for Gmail.
- eBay announced Selling Manager Apps beta - The Selling Manager (SM) suite of productivity tools now supports the OpenSocial gadget spec and has opened up the beta platform to all developers.

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