This guest post was written by the ClackPoint Team from Vipadia (UK). ClackPoint is the protocol-agnostic cloud-based real-time collaboration platform. Visit http://clackpoint.com for more information. - Ed.

Now that you've added Google Friend Connect to your site and are using some of the great gadgets to develop your community, have you wanted more direct communication with and between community members? Well, ClackPoint gives you exactly this by mixing text chat, conference calling and a dash of document sharing, and presenting it as a gadget for Friend Connect.

The ClackPoint gadget doesn't just let your users chat live in a text-based chat room, it also lets them dial in and talk either directly from their computer or, if they prefer, by phone. Status icons in the gadget mean that users can see who is dialed in and who is talking, and can poke or mute themselves or each other.

In addition to supporting live text and audio chat, ClackPoint also provides collaboration features, including a shared notepad allowing multiple users to edit simultaneously, and slide sharing for those times when your community needs to present and discuss written information.

We think that integrating online collaboration with Friend Connect makes a lot of sense. Friend Connect is already a great way to extend a website with social features to build a community, and the heart of any community is how it communicates and interacts with itself and others. Bringing live text, voice and document sharing into a website keeps users on that site and strengthens the community built around it.

Developing a gadget for Friend Connect was a great experience. Friend Connect's use of OpenSocial meant we could target multiple social networks with one code base, greatly accelerating our development.

Visit our sample website to see this gadget in action and learn more about it.

Posted by the ClackPoint Team, Vipadia

This guest post was written by Eiji Kitamura, a developer of one of the biggest portal sites in Japan called "goo". On May 21st, 2009, "goo home" publicly launched the first Japan oriented OpenSocial container. He is also a Google API Expert, PHP Shindig contributer, and leader of the SocialWeb Japan community. - Ed.

My name is Eiji Kitamura and I developed the Footprints gadget for Google Friend Connect. This gadget let's you see which of your members have recently visited your site by displaying up to 10 of their footprints. The gadget shows the name of the visitor, their photo, and the approximate time they last visited your site. Clicking on a visitor's photo will take you to their profile, where you can learn more about them and add them as a friend. Your visitors will have the option to remove their own footprints if they do not want to appear in the gadget.

I wanted to make this feature available for sites using Friend Connect because it is actually quite common in Japanese social networking services. It enables people to see who visited their diary (another popular feature) and encourages them to communicate with one another.

Creating a gadget for Friend Connect was as simple as creating an OpenSocial gadget. Most of specs are exactly the same, except for the concept of permissions. OpenSocial gadgets on social network services always have someone as an owner, but Friend Connect gadgets have the site itself as the owner and the members of the site are then treated as friends of the owner.

To learn more about creating Friend Connect gadgets, visit Google Code. And visit my blog to see the Footprints gadget in action.

Posted by Eiji Kitamura, Gadget Developer

Accessing the web from 35,000 feet in the air is becoming more of a reality thanks to airlines like Virgin America, who recently rolled out in-flight WiFi across their fleet. Now that you can get online, even from the clouds, Google Apps and Virgin America are teaming up to co-host a timed online scavenger hunt called the Day in the Cloud Challenge on Wednesday, June 24th. Thousands of people in the air and on the ground that day will participate in a one-hour challenge which consists of a series of puzzles and trivia questions. The top 5 scorers will receive a "Year in the Cloud" prize package, which includes a year of free flights from Virgin America, free in-flight Wi-Fi, a netbook computer, and 1 terabyte of Google Account storage for Gmail and Picasa Web Albums.

When developing the site for the Day in the Cloud Challenge, the team needed a space where competitors could meet each other and hang out prior to (and during) the challenge. They turned to Google Friend Connect to provide this functionality.

They first developed The Lounge to fit the design of the rest of the site. Then they added a members gadget, giving it ample space so that competitors could learn more about each other. Below that, they placed a comments gadget to encourage spirited pre-game banter between the players. After embedding YouTube videos to give participants ideas for how to prep for the challenge, they used a Polls gadget to add engagement to the site, asking people what they really do to pass the time on a long-haul flight.

Visit The Lounge to engage in some banter, take the poll, and get ready for the challenge. On game-day (June 24th) check back to see site members discuss the game all throughout the day.

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

We're back from attending Google I/O in San Francisco, and it was great meeting those of you who were there. For those who couldn't make it (or if you were there and missed something), videos of each session are now posted online along with the slides from the presentations.

A few sessions I particularly enjoyed were:

• Google Friend Connect Gadgets: Best Practices in Code and Interaction Design - Ryan Boyd and Jonathan Terleski discussed the best practices for designing and writing OpenSocial gadgets for the millions of sites and blogs using Friend Connect.
• Beyond Cut and Paste: Deep integrations with Google Friend Connect - Arne Roomann-Kurrik and Chris Schalk demonstrated how to integrate Google Friend Connect with existing login systems and add social functionality using the REST and RPC APIs.
• The Social Web: An Implementer's Guide - Joseph Smarr discussed the current state of the social web and the adoption of a variety of open technologies helping to make the web more social.
• Google and the Social Web - Daniel Holevoet explained how Google is using social features in our products and announced the new support for OpenSocial gadgets in Google Calendar.

A summary of all the sessions in the social track can be found on the Google Code Blog. Go check these out, relive any you liked, and leave a comment with your thoughts.

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

Creating a social gadget for Google Friend Connect just became a little easier and more flexible. Here are some of the recent changes that will impact you as a developer:

• Friend Connect now supports OpenSocial Specification v0.9, which adds a number of important features to improve the gadget development process and the performance of gadgets. These features include OS Lite, OSML, templates, proxied content and more.
• Want to ask site owners to configure additional preferences before adding your gadget to their sites? Now you can with the gadgets.Prefs functionality. Define the preferences you need in the XML gadgets specification, and the site owner will be asked to provide the values for the preferences when they get the code for the gadget. More information on the XML definition for these preferences is available in the OpenSocial XML Reference.
• Let site owners customize the color of your gadget to match their sites. When the site owners generate the code for the gadget, they will have the option to set the colors they want to use, ensuring that the gadget integrates well with the style of their site. For more information on OpenSocial skins, see the gadgets.skins API reference.
• After your gadget is built, we would like to include it in the Friend Connect gadget gallery so that site owners will have more ways to engage their visitors. After testing your gadget and making sure it has the required fields in the gadget XML file, submit it for inclusion in our gallery. We will review your gadget and add it to our gallery once it is approved.

To learn more, visit Google Code. Thanks for taking the time to create your gadget and we look forward to seeing all the innovative gadgets that will make the web more social. With more than 5 million sites using Friend Connect, we're sure they'll find some good homes.

Posted by Sami Shalabi, Technical Lead, Google Friend Connect