Monday, December 15, 2008

@Twitter @GoogleFriendConnect Hey Guys!

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase, source unknownGoogle have today announced that Google Friend Connect has integrated with Twitter. This means that when you join a friend connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website.

Friend Connect supports logins from Google, Yahoo, AIM, and OpenID, I use my Google Account to login to the service and in the settings you will find the option to Add/Remove Networks. Located in this setting you will be able to connect a new network, as well as Twitter you can also use Orkut or Plaxo.


Press continue and you will be taken to a login screen where you will be asked to provide your Twitter username and password.

Once your Twitter login has been confirmed, you'll be returned to the Google Friend Connect settings window.

To retrieve your profile data from Twitter you need to enter your login details -

You'll now be able to see which of your Twitter contacts are already members of this and other Friend Connect sites.

You can invite Twitter contacts to visit this site wherever you see an "Invite" link.

After Twitter verification you will be taken back to your account Settings, it's here where you will be able to change the login profile

You will then receive a confirmation message detailing the following -
Your Twitter name and picture have been imported

You'll now be able to see which of your Twitter contacts are already members of this and other Friend Connect sites.

You can invite Twitter contacts to visit this site wherever you see an "Invite" link.

If you click the "invite" link that lives in most Friend Connect widgets, a popup window will open where you can click "share" and the select the Twitter option and Friend Connect will automatically take you to Twitter.com and pre-populate a tweet with the message "I'm looking at [URL of site]" making it easy to share links on Twitter.[Source]
Using the above mentioned sharing functionality, I shared with my Twitter followers that I was looking at my blog and below is a screenshot of how this is displayed -

The integration is definitely a positive for Friend Connect, it's also a strong statement from Twitter having overcome reliability problems earlier this year. Twitter has become the first third party service after Plaxo to integrate with Google’s new service and there is potential to expand on the features available. I would like to see the ability to share individual blog posts as that would be a feature I would use daily!

I highly rate Facebook Connect with the ability to share your activity back to your Facebook profile but I find that Google Friend Connect is much easier to implement. It's still very early days but this is proving to be an interesting battle, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect are clearly the main players. I haven't really read too much into MySpaceID but I feel already they have lost significant ground. With Google Friend Connect being the main story today I am looking forward to Facebook's response...

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