Google Friend Connect: Friend or Foe?
Google has recently come out with an interesting new social networking tool, Google Friend Connect, allowing website owners to quickly and easily integrate social features into their sites.
What are the benefits? As Google says in their own words:
“Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.
Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.
No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.”
It’s an interesting idea and if widely adopted the benefits for users are obvious. Suddenly with one set of login information (your existing Google, Yahoo! account etc) you’d be able to interact with all types of websites across the web.
Google is also happy. They would be provided with a huge amount of information on websites, particularly useful at a time when Google is integrating more behavioural data into its ranking system. SEO is certainly changing and will soon fully emcompass web analytics, link building, on-page and on-site optimisation, along with the user experience.
But is Google Friend Connect a good idea for website owners?
I’m not convinced. From a purely visual point of view it could look better, although no doubt customisation options will become available.
However, of more concern is the fact that website owners would no longer have a direct relationship with their users. You could have a hugely popular site but with no database of members your business would become increasingly susceptible to competitors and Google. If a better website comes along your visitors leave and there’s no easy way to get them back. There’s no unique community developed and with no database of members online businesses will look fragile.
As an example UK Business Forums was recently sold for a quarter of a million pounds, a website with over 20,000 active members. What would have been its value if it had no unique members, instead just having users interact through Google Friend Connect? Perhaps for forums this isn’t possible at the moment but it’ll surely become available in the future.
What is clear though is that the days are numbered for shallow affiliate websites. To succeed online a user-friendly experience has to be on offer – no longer will a few high quality links and keyword-rich content be enough to get a site ranked highly in Google.
