Google Friend Connect API Available in Labs

By Mussie Shore, Product Manager - Google Friend Connect

Today we are excited to make the Google Friend Connect API available to developers. Google Friend Connect lets a site owner instantly awaken and strengthen the community that visits their web site.

Friend Connect has enabled tens of thousands of sites like naturalnews.com, and millions of blogs like paulocoelhoblog.com, to build their communities. Now, we are pleased to open up the service to the broader development community. With Google Friend Connect, two of our primary goals are to:

• Make it easy for every site owner to add Friend Connect to their site, regardless of their technical capabilities. We do this by letting site owners simply paste snippets of code into their websites' HTML to instantly provide social capabilities on their sites.


• Be open by letting visitors control their own data and freely share it with sites and services as they see fit. Services that are currently integrated with Friend Connect include OpenID providers like Yahoo!, social network providers like Twitter, and update aggregators like Plaxo Pulse.
  

The combination of ease and openness puts visitors and site owners in full control of their social information, activities, and relationships throughout the web. As a developer, the Labs release of our API lets you:

• Use JavaScript APIs to integrate social flows and data directly within your page's markup, via the OpenSocial standard specification.


• Use REST APIs to integrate your existing login systems, registered users, and your existing data with new social data and activities. These APIs are also part of the OpenSocial standard.
  

In addition, we have used the APIs to build open source plugin samples that integrate into popular commenting and content systems including WordPress, Drupal, and phpBB.

This release is documented in code.google.com. To take advantage of the the API on your site, go to www.google.com/friendconnect and visit the "for developers" section to grab the snippet that enables the new API on your site.



We're looking forward to hearing your feedback, and to seeing how the development community will combine their creativity, Google Friend Connect, and these APIs to enrich the open social web. Make sure to check out Google I/O on May 27 - 28 where you can meet the engineering team and learn more about the Google Friend Connect API.