Google Friend Connect

[aidan6969]

Hi,

I'm not sure how many folks have actually added Google's Friend Connect
(Google Friend Connect: Add social features to your site) to their site yet, but I added it to Home*-*Practical leadership articles, books, consulting, training - Clemmer a few hours after it was officially released.

The problem is that I only have 4 folks signed up -including the site owner and myself- which doesn't reflect the traffic we get to the site.

Would anyone be interested in a little "friend trading?"

I'll join your site and you join mine? I think this might provide the critical mass to get the sign-ups growing organically.

You can send a note to aidan.crawford@clemmer.net and we can get started this morning.

Cheers,
Aidan

[ctabuk]

Quotes

You understand and agree that your use of the Services may cause you to interact with products or services not operated or controlled by Google ("Third Party Gadgets"), and that Google does not represent or endorse, and shall not be responsible for the availability, safety, quality, accuracy, reliability, integrity or legality of any such Third Party Gadgets or any content displayed or distributed through such Third Party Gadgets. Your display, distribution, integration, or other use of any Third Party Gadget is limited to such Third Party Gadget's intended use and subject to your compliance with the applicable terms of the Syndicated Google Gadgets Terms of Service for Webmasters at Google

Spyware, stay with the normal facebook etc. It's just another tracker

[aidan6969]

So far I'm simply using the member gadget from Google and I'm pretty sure that's all I'll be using on the site. I think anywhere you build a public profile, you have to understand that information can and will be used for tracking and marketing.

Facebook ads let me target right down based on age, likes, geography and even workplace - so I don't see how that's any better.

[ctabuk]

Always remember the simple adage 'Google does nothing for nothing' but if it works for you fine.

[SIA]

Well I see both sides of this coin. On the one side, you have a tool which may or may not give Google an additional way to track the popularity of your site and rank it accordingly. On the other, ctabuk is right that Google does nothing without some kind of profit behind it. So you have to wonder; where is the payoff here? Is Google using this to simply help create a better search result for browsers to increase their stats, or are they using it for information tracking for their own marketing and advertising dollar purposes. I look at Google Talk and like it because there is no advertising on it. But honestly, if I am Google (Lord knows how many times we have all wished that) I wait until I have enough users and then set my advertising prices to be high enought that ramping it up just wouldn't be as profitable as waiting for ten million users.

Will be interesting to see what the internet mafia does next.

(Note to Google: Ha ha, just kidding on the internet mafia thing. Please don't kill me)

[ctabuk]

Rep point awarded to SIA - excellent posting. Stepping outside of the box. Good tatics.