New From Google: AdWords Connect
by John Paczkowski
Posted on May 12, 2008 at 12:00 AM PT
Google calls its latest data portability effort Friend Connect, but a better name might have been AdWords Connect. Because, like most Google (GOOG) initiatives, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Connecting people to ads? And there’s a lot more opportunity for that when the Web itself becomes a social network. Which is exactly the sort of thing you hope for when those unobtrusive little contextual ads you sell are as ubiquitous as street signs on the Web.
Designed to help Web publishers easily add social-networking features to their sites, Friend Connect requires just a snippet of code to bring social features to a site along with a means of coordinating them with other social networks like Facebook, Plaxo and Google’s Orkut. It’s another in a recent string of data-portability efforts that hope to apply the distributed model to social networking and put an end to its so-called “walled gardens.”
“The distributed model has worked well for the Web,” David Glazer, Google director of engineering, told Outside the Lines’ Dan Farber. “That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. Now it is working to connect people to other people.”
And all of them to Google AdWords, of course. More Internet usage. More ad revenue.
Comments
However, I really see benefit to the small time web master or people who just want to add social features to their site but perhaps just don’t have the knowledge or the $’s to buy a script.
Google friend connect is very easy to add to any site, that it requires very basic computer knowledge to setup, which I think is key to the success of the gadget implementation as more and more sites enable them which will spiral more viral communication streams between sites, which previously may not have been linked.
There is a google friend connect directory being created across at gfcdirectory[dot]com which is encouraging all sites that are using friend connect gadgets to register for free, seems like a great idea for folks who are looking for sites that are running the gadgets enabled.
Posted by reuben boyd at December 24th, 2008 at 6:04 am