With the new support, you’ll be able to logon to any Friend Connect-supporting site with your Twitter ID. You can then use your Twitter profile to engage on the site as well as find other Twitter friends and tweet information back to Twitter as well.

To use the new Twitter Friend Connect integration, all you have to do is click the Twitter icon on the “Share” tab of the Friend Connect widget on any participating site.

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1. Google Friend Connect comes to The Inquisitr
2. Google Introduces Friend Connect
3. TweetDeck Adds Facebook Integration

Google Friend Connect is the latest in a trend of big media companies who are ‘opening up their users data’ to help make the web more social. Facebook recently scored big by securing a deal that would allow Digg, Hulu and Discovery users to sign up and authenticate using their existing accounts. This is huge because it opens up all of Facebooks users to those services, allowing them to quickly create profiles and to use the same username and pass across all four services. Not to be out done, Google is prepping the launch of their own portable identity service Friend Connect. But with this service, could they be poising themselves to make the web one huge social network?

Let’s look at the evidence:

* Google Profiles
* Google Friend Connect
* Picasa
* Jaiku
* Google Chat
* Blogger
* Gmail
* iGoogle
* Google Reader

The most telling evidence is Google Profiles which, like ClaimID, is an attempt to allow people to ‘claim their identities’ online.

Read the rest of this post on AppAfrica.

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1. The Race To Social Network 2.0
2. Google Social Search launches in Google Labs
3. Google Introduces Friend Connect

I know this because we are one of them.

If you’d like to “join” this site as a friend, the Google Friend Connect box is currently located below popular posts in the sidebar, and depending on the response we get, it may get moved up or down in the coming days.

First Impressions

Typical Google aesthetics are offered when you first sign in to Google Friend Connect. Users a prompted to accept a T&C statement, and I agreed but have no idea what it said.

Next stop is site details, which is easy enough. Name of site and URL. You are then prompted to download two files that must be uploaded your server for Google Friend Connect to work. I don’t know why Google uses these files given some similar widget providers (MyBlogLog comes to mind) simply require an embed, but who am I to argue.

First stop is a Friend Connect widget that is similar to MyBlogLog, where users can “join” a site, although from what I can gather, this doesn’t include any special privleges apart from what the competition offers. There is some suggestion of “friend tracking” but I’ll have to play with that later. Users can also “invite” other users to join your site.

What did surprise me was some of the other features offered by Friend Connect under the heading “social gadgets.” Top of the list is a nice enough looking Comments Wall, not something we’d necessarily use, but handy. There’s also a “rate/review” widget that offers a combination of Outbrain and Disqus functionality. I’m not sure how difficult it is to implement on a WordPress install per post without having done it, but here’s the foundations of a service from Google that may see it start to reach into ratings and commenting 2.0 territory.

One feature Google should be commended on is strong customization options. No, you can’t make the widgets super pretty, but similar to Adsense with more options, you can customize the widgets to fit your site nicely.

Conclusion

There isn’t really a conclusion yet. Google Friend Connect doesn’t look half bad at first look, and the set up was nice and easy. There’s only one way to find out whether this is a useful tool for blog owners: you need to sign up in the sidebar so we can report back at a later date

Update: first thing I’ve noticed: each member image leads to a list of links back to that persons sites, which is good, but you have to have added your sites to your Google Profile, so I’d recommend doing so.

Related posts:

1. Twitter Adds Google Friend Connect Integration
2. Google Introduces Friend Connect
3. Google Stealthily Building a Social Network?

TNC founder Chang Kim doesn’t disclose the full details of the sale, but speculates that the acquisition may have been motivated by Google’s desire to improve its presence in South Korea, a market the American search giant has struggled in.

The comparison to Automattic is made by Kim himself, and the parallels are obvious: popular blogging platform used by A-List bloggers (65 of the top 100 bloggers in South Korea use it), with an install base of 400,000 users.

In a statement (via VentureBeat, I haven’t found it at time of writing):

Google confirmed the deal Friday morning, saying it wants to “broaden its portfolio of locally-focused products, further encourage creation of openly accessible user-generated content, and improve search experiences of Korean users.” In a statement, it also said it will add “additional resources, via acquisition or otherwise.

The emphasis is mine, but it’s key to looking at the deal past the obvious South Korea market play. Google hasn’t just bought into South Korea, they’ve purchased a platform they can use, either as a standalone product (and we’d presume that it will remain standalone given the numbers and the obvious South Korean benefits) and/ or in conjunction with existing Google properties, such as Blogger for example. Chang Kim mentions in his post that the TextCube platform is more advanced than existing players in offering social networking as part of their blogging platform, so this is another angle to consider.

Automattic as the target

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is a Google competitor today, and is moving into the social networking space through its acquisition of BuddyPress. Blogger may be the more popular free hosted blogging platform, yet WordPress.com recently passed the 4 million blog mark, and WordPress is the most popular self hosted blogging script. Google doesn’t offer a self hosted blogging platform, and so far their only effort to get into the space, aside from the near ubiquitous Adsense advertising network, is through the still in closed beta offering of Google Friend Connect. Widgets though don’t really deliver presence in the way that a self hosted platform does, and with Automattic controlling WordPress, the integration advantage will never side with Google.

Google now owns a competitor to WordPress the self hosted blogging platform, and to think that they won’t eventually use it outside of South Korea, particularly if it’s as good as some say it is, would be false. They will use it, in one form or another, and suddenly the self hosted blogging market gets interesting again. SixApart is also in the mix, but their core products tend to be upmarket, paid products vs the much lower market share of MovableType, so although Google would compete here, there’s a lot less to lose. Automattic is the company with the most to lose when Google uses this acquisition to get serious in offering an all round suite of blogging tools. If Google has decided it wants to compete in self hosted blogging, Automattic must be the target.

(img credit)

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2. Automattic, Those Champions of Open Source Plug The Microsoft Cloud
3. Automattic Acquires After The Deadline. Bloggers Suddenly Learn How To Spell