Adding Google Friend Connect activity to your FriendFeed is not hard to do when you know a few “work around” tricks, and I can show you how to get it done in 10 easy steps! The challenge is that FriendFeed does not allow Google Friend Connect to be added to its’ stream yet and that your Google Friend Connect Feed that goes through Plaxo is not able to be read by FriendFeed, Facebook etc…
I have to say with a little bit of an evil chuckle, that by adding your Google Friend Connect to your FriendFeed, and having the FriendFeed app enabled in Facebook, you can now feed your Google Friend Connect activity straight into Facebook for all your Facebook friends to see… And since Facebook has made it so damn hard to integrate THEIR Friend Connect app on the average users blog, you will likely have some of your jealous Facebook friends climb out of the walled garden to come and play with you in the real world. *wink*
Here is a Handy Little 5 minute video i created that walks you through the feed setup:
Below the Video you will find the text tutorial.
1. To get started go to your Google Friend Connect app on your site and click “settings” you will be taken to your profile page.
2. In your Google Friend Connect Profile, Make sure you have selected Orkut and Plaxo
3. Select the “Show Your Activity on this site to other users and friends” box
4. Go to your Plaxo profile page and you should now see your Google Friend Connect stream showing. You will want to click on the “view all” in the right corner of your Pulse Stream to see your Pulse Stream page.
Here is what your Pulse Stream Page looks like:
5. Firefox users, click on the RSS button up in your URL window to go to the Plaxo Pulse Stream Feed page.
6. Enable Your PulseStream “me” on the Pulse Stream Page and copy the URL to your clipboard.
7. Go to your Feedburner Account, and burn the new Feed URL into a feed:
8. Go to the new Feed page and get the New FeedBurner URL for the Plaxo Feed that has your Google Friend Connect Feed in it and log into your FriendFeed account:
9. In FriendFeed you will want to “Import a Site”, treating the new Feedburner feed like a blog:
10. Add your Feedburner URL to the RSS/Blog entry and once you hit save it should import your Plaxo/Google Friend Connect feed right into your FriendFeed, and anywhere else you have friendfeed enabled to stream! You can also use the feedburner feed to stream into your other lifestreams that you might have in other networks.
I am sure that once you have the hang of this, you will think of creative ways to use your Google Friend Connect and other social feeds across all your networks. Remember that you may not want some feeds to display in some networks, so use your discretion as to what feeds are running where to avoid mixing your business, church, family etc… into one big swimming pool.
Technology Goddess is Google Friend Connect powered now, so please do come and join in the social conversation. It’s exciting to be part of the groundbreaking of a new social application that likely will see millions of users in the near future.
The sites that are coming online are pretty much relying on organic search results to show they have Friend Connect enabled on the site so that other users can find them without searching through tons of profiles. This is why I am creating this post, so that in the search results when someone types in “Google Friend Connect Sites” or the like, they can find me and decide if I’m someone they would like to befriend.
All in all, I love friend connect so far and am having a lot of fun connecting with the other users coming online with it!
The fact that you can travel from site to site, and have your friends travel with you is wonderful!
I am also able to see what other sites my friends have joined, and then go check out those sites to see if they interest me as well.
In the near future, simply having the ability to see what sites your friends are on, and then visit those sites and join is going to provide an almost limitless supply of amazing new websites and places to visit.
Right now all of the newly Friend Connect enabled site owners are trying to connect with each other for the purpose of exploring the community. I have decided that an ongoing list of sites that I discover and find are on Google Friend Connect might be helpful for those of you just coming online with Friend Connect and looking around to see where you can play.
My List of Google Friend Connect Enabled Websites:
If you have a site that is Google Friend Connect Enabled and would like to be listed, please comment on this post below with your site URL and join my Friend network and I’ll come by your site to check it out. (spammy or creepy sites I will not link to.)
This is only a service I’m going to provide until there is something “Google official” for Friend Connect Powered sites to be found by one another easily. (Hmmm directory?)
Once there are thousands of sites powered, this will also not be an issue, the neural aspect of the network will start to make finding one another easy! In the meantime, lets connect, have fun and enjoy being some of the pioneers in this new network!
Over the last few months Google Blog Search has had some strange anomalies in the blog search results and indexing that left many blog owners scratching our heads. The good news is that Google is aware of the issues and a fix is in the works, according to Jeremy Hylton of the Google Blog Search Team.
The problems have stemmed from Google Blog Search indexing blogs primarily by RSS feeds only, which meant that for blogs that only have a “partial” feed (such as title only or just the introduction and not the whole post), Google Blog Search would ONLY index the partial portion. Many blogs have the partial feed enabled because they are running the feeds as post titles or summaries through social apps like FriendFeed and profile pages.
The result of Google Blog Search indexing by RSS feeds meant that any links or text that was in the rest of the post was not avalable through blog search, although the full posts were still being indexed by web search. This caused major discrepencies in search, indexing and ranking results.
Jeremy Hylton of the Google Blog Search Team says that they will now index the FULL content of the blog page, even if the blog publishes only a partial feed. BUT that this means it will also now index the non-post parts of your blog pages too.
How is this currently effecting your blog indexing? Well, because your non-post parts of the pages are also indexing, you may notice that your tags are also now sometimes indexing as pages, because anytime a blog publishes a new post Google Blogsearch is picking up the new page the post is in, including the sidebar details.
This also causes challenges for people who have alerts set up or do searches on themselves, their sites or their brand because you may get an alert or a search result that shows you are on the post, but when you go to the site you cannot find yourself anywhere on the page.
Jeremy says they are aware that indexing the entire page the post is on is not a perfect or long-term fix, but it is better than indexing by the RSS feed only.
“We do expect to fix the problem you are seeing. We’ll use the full page content, but exclude the content that isn’t really part of the post. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to make the change before the end of the year, but we are working on it and are pretty confident that it can be solved,” said Jeremy.
He also adds that once the blog indexing problems are fixed they will post an update at Google.
“We have changed the way we index blog posts to include the full content of the page. We’ve had occasional complaints about the use of the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds. The indexing change has improved the results for a lot of queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because we extract links that are missing from the feeds. The downside of this change is that we see more results that match only the blogroll and other parts of the page that are common to all of a blog’s posts,” explains Jeremy Hylton.
Jeremy also adds that that, “The algorithm will be improved to exclude “the content that isn’t really part of the post” to make the results more useful.”
Google almost always does a great job of picking up on major problems like this one and getting a fix out while keeping us informed of what the issue is.
In my case, I wish I had known this two weeks ago, as I had a few “late nights” up scratching my head trying to figure out why the strange indexing and search results were coming back on my blogs. It’s good to know that the strangeness in the blogosphere index will soon start to stabilize!
Google Friend Connect Beta is moving forward with the next wave of approved beta testers in it’s preparations for open beta testing. I just received my Google Friend Connect invite today and the Technology Goddess blog is now participating in the beta version of Friend Connect.
This great social app integrates full community capability into any website or blog, and although right now there are not a lot of widgets developed yet with Google Friend Connect, it is OpenSocial and so I am anticipating that once it goes live there will be a multitude of wonderful gadgets developed to optimize your on-site community!
I have already integrated Google Friend Connect on the Technology Goddess blog, and you can now join the community and the conversation!
My Thoughts so far:
Google Friend Connect was super-easy to install and integrate, easier than building most social widgets. I have created a basic tutorial for you in the Technology Goddess blog showing my own installation of Google Friend Connect.
Right now the “wall” widget is ready to use so users can comment on your site, a nifty feature of the “wall” is that you can specify whether you want the widget to be for the entire site or a page. This means that you can have different areas of pages of your site, or perhaps a popular article on your blog that can have a unique “comments” wall for your community. Yes, blogs already have “comments” but the fact that you can now create this anywhere for your community is outstanding.
The “Ratings” widget is similar, you can specify the “ratings” widget to cover an entire site, a page, an article or item. So yes, you can have rating not only for your articles or blog posts, but perhaps for your reviews of other products? I will have this widget integrated shortly with new articles that cover technology apps. so that my community can share in the ratings process.
The setup for Google Friend Connect was amazingly easy and graceful, so easy in fact, my blog could almost do it on it’s own. It took me less than 10 minutes to add full community capability onto my Technology Goddess blog, and I recorded two videos of the setup process.
Video One: Google Friend Connect Setup and Installation:
Video Two: Google Friend Connect Setup and Installation:
That’s my overview on setting up Google Friend connect on your blog or website. It took me only a few minutes to have a community flourishing on my blog. Very Cool.
This is one of the richest interviews we have ever given. If you know the
right questions to ask someone like Kevin Marks, you can come pretty close
to predicting the next couple years of Google’s technology objectives.
Kevin Marks is a Developer Advocate for Open Social at Google, bringing
external developers and Google engineers together to make a better web.
Over the last 20 years he’s alternated between giant companies and founding
startups - BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati
and now Google. The common thread has been working out how people,
computers and media can complement each other, and solving the engineering
and social problems where they meet. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights group. He wants you to
remember that URLs are people too.
CNET Credits Kevin Marks for the genesis of podcasting as he was a primary
developer of the program that downloads RSS-enclosure audio files and
transfers them to Apples I-tunes music player so they could be synchronized
onto the I-Pod. Later this became know as podcasting. (This is why
Feedburner has two feed options, one for podcasting and one for direct
feeds).
Here are some of the major topics and controversial questions covered in
this interview:
- How many Open Social applications exist at Google?
- Why is the concept of “data portability” a misnomer?
- How does Social Graph work with the publicly declared connections, XHTML
friends networks, XFN markup and FOAF (friend of a friend)?
- Google did not create a unique crawler for XFN and FOAF. (This has been
heavily debated and Kevin puts this controversy to rest).
- What are Google’s plans for XFN and FOAF as it relates to Search Engine
Optimization? (This has been heavily debated and Kevin puts this
controversy to rest).
- What does it mean (exactly) that Googlebot follows XFN and FOAF? (This
has also been heavily debated and Kevin puts this controversy to rest).
- XFN markup and FOAF were originally designed to display the distributed
networks and social relationships to the general public. How should you
prepare for where this is all going?
- What are the security risks and concerns regarding all of these publicly
revealed social networks.
- What is an “activity stream” and how do you avoid mixing your friends
from Church with your friends at the night club?
- Because Googlebot follows publicly declared connections via FOAF and XFN
it should be easy to determine where the “influencers” are located over
massive global networks. Why has Google rethought their strategy on where
true influencers exist as nodes on networks?
- How will the recent “geek disputes” about this issue effect the
proprietary and Google patented “influence rank” concept? (This is also
called “friend rank” or “social value rank” by the Internet Marketing
pundits).
- It it really possible to use “knowledge of influencers” to predictably
place “interruption advertising” inside major networks?
- Can you expect good conversion using this sort of “influence rank” as a
predictor? (Kevin really exposes the issues that Google has been sorting
through in order to adequately answer this question).
- Why is it unwise to view social networks as a channel for Adsense based
on traditional “search” behaviors?
- What is the best way to use social networks from a branding and
advertising?
- What is a “self targeting” ad network when it comes to social networks?
- One of the biggest challenges Google developers have had is trying to
create a data model that maps the natural discernment processes taking
place in the human brain (Cognitive Neuroscience). What do you need to know
about the weaknesses of machine driven neural and social networks?
- When will Friend Connect be released and why is it taking so long?
- What are the Google Friend Connect developers currently focused on in
the lab?
- I-Google (Google personal desktop) now has Canvas mode. How will this
relate to Friend Connect.
Special Thanks to Kevin Marks, Sara Jew-Lim and the Google Open Social
development team.
Special Thanks to Erika Preuss of TechnologyGoddess.com who landed and
coordinated this interview.
I look forward to seeing all of you at the Theme Zoom Protege Event where
Sue, Jon, Erika and I can expand on exactly what all of Kevin’s information
means to your business over the next two years.
At the Theme Zoom Protege conference we might informally chat about the
following topics between other program events, so take the time to listen
to the interview:
- What does this new information about Open Standard means for your
Krakken Keyword Genetic Code?
- How does this information influence the Silo Feed Machine System as
Erika and I work out with Sue Bell how to handle the technology and final
development aspects of the system. It is ironic that one of the final steps
during our blueprinting of the Silo Feed Machine system was how we should
deal with “podcast enclosures” as separate feeds from your primary data
feeds- ironic in that Kevin invented these (sometimes) annoying-but-useful
things.
- Feeds are the Glue that can hold all of your primary and secondary
networks together if you know what you are doing. How can you use them
(combined with your Krakken Genetic Keyword Code) to improve website
conversion?
- How has this information has been simplified by our Silo Feed Machine
system so that you do not need to be a rocket scientist in order to
implement geeky technologies invented by aliens?
Erika of Technology Goddess here, sharing with you my recent interview with Kevin Marks, a Google OpenSocial Developer Advocate. It is one of the richest and most informative interviews I have heard with a Google Developer online. Kevin is author of the weblog Epeus Epigone and became principal engineer for Technorati after doing work for both Apple and the BBC. He is one of the founders of Microformats and CNet credits Kevin as one of the primary contributors to the genesis of podcasting technology as we know it today.
Kevin shares insights with me into Google’s OpenSocial philosophy and future as well as FOAF, the Google Social Graph API, how the Googlebot follows FOAF and XFN markup links and publicly declared connections, what Google Developers are currently focused on in the lab and the future of Google Friend Connect.
I so enjoyed talking with such an innovative and brilliant mind on the forefront of internet social development. Go grab a latte and sit down for this full interview, because you will not want to miss a word of Kevin’s in-depth peek inside Google’s Development environment.
Google has just released a whole set of yummy new enterprise additions to it’s analytics buffet and they are all worth tasting. They include: Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports, a data export API (private beta), integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta), multi-dimensional data visualizations called “Motion Charts,” and an updated user and administrative interface.
For more insight on the new analytics features you can visit the Google Blog which has a complete rundown of every feature with advanced instructions, and watch the videos I’m including here for you below. As a creative-type geometry geek I am really into the Motion Charts, which give us a multi-dimensional view of our data. That, to me, is like analytics candy!
I am super-excited to announced that next Tuesday morning I will be posting a podcast interview with a Google OpenSocial and Friend Connect Developer. I know that many of you are anticipating the launch of Google’s Friend Connect and have a lot of questions about some of the other great OpenSocial projects Google has going like Social Graph API, and I’ll try to pose as many questions as we have time for in the interview. Here is my Video announcement and I hope to see all of you here on Tuesday!
Many of us in the Tech community tend to have a smug ego-centric assumption that we technically-savvy web 2.0 geeks are smarter. According to a new study from UCLA, our smug assumption is correct. Google search DOES make your smarter, actually it doubles your neural activity in the decision-making and complex reasoning part of the brain. The more experienced searcher you are, the higher your neural activity. The study used live MRI brain scans to monitor brain activity comparing online search engine pages with book pages. Read more
The Technology Goddess Blog was so honored to be a Google Friend Connect Beta tester. Please join the conversation with me!
TED: Webs Secret Stories
Jonathan Harris' software reveals the emotional world of the Web. With deep compassion for the human condition, his projects troll the Internet to find out what we're all feeling and searching for and gives us a glimpse into the Soul of the internet and humanity.
I'm sharing my lifestyle picks, pleasures and general dopamine enhancers in Lifestyle. I'm not your average blond, and no one has ever called me "normal", so be prepared for some hedonic treadmill fun as you browse my brain. When you are ready to jump off the treadmill, Check out NeuroMarketing and find out what's really going on when you drool over those shiny new things!
