May 16, 2010

Google Friend Connect And Gravatars

(This was originally posted at Ferodynamics.com, but I’m reposting it here because it relates to WordPress.)

After a few days of research, I decided to add Google Friend Connect to my Ferodynamics.com WordPress blog. (You can’t add all your blogs at once, you must add each individually–this is why I don’t have a GFC gadget here on WP-Fun.co.uk, at least not yet.)

I think GFC is a great idea–what took me so long to discover it?

Now maybe you can see other people who visit here and get a chance to see what they’re interested in. When you click my Google Friend Connect icon you can see other blogs I “joined” using Google Friend Connect.

There are a lot of possibilities. If you have a website, I recommend you give it a try–all you need to do is add the Google Friend Connect widget code to your pages (takes 1 minute) and *bam* you’re hooked into this viral GFC community that spans the entire Internet.

I’m enthusiastic and plan to promote this more. I have heard some bloggers say they don’t “get” Google Friend Connect but I think Google Friend Connect “gets” bloggers. It was created specifically *for* independent bloggers.

Right now, independent bloggers don’t have much in the way of “glue” to tie blogs together. MyBlogLog was promising in that respect before Yahoo killed it, as they tend to do.

I had always hoped the “Gravatar” concept would grow into something like Google Friend Connect, but that never happened. I don’t really blame Automattic, anyone (myself included) could have developed a plugin to push Gravatars further, but there’s only so much time in the day.

That said, I can still imagine some kind of “Google Friend Connect meets Gravatars plugin” for WordPress–I think it would work with enough blogger interest. Google’s approach works, but I would actually like to see it implemented without the popups and AJAX. So the friend matrix hover content (name, description, url) could be indexed like the rest of the page.

For example, I think the title tag GFC uses here falls short:

<img style=”cursor: pointer;“ jsvalues=”.src:getThumbnail($this,32);$h:handle(this,’viewProfile’);title:getDisplayName()“ jstcache=”30“ src=”http://www.google.com/friendconnect/profile/picture/32/B1E2JvSiF0XuQbA8a0W9dJ93R5Ko-f99k4_UXJlfnCF4a8RjW0lXNAQjhYjIhAScYc_uWUuXn1kC-14oMGMJilgmlTaSe95kC_GAg-J8IUy8amokPsNSqolmrNXzQ0yAoSkOQO_y3hg“ title=”PJ Brunet“/>

Come on Google, that’s not really crawlable. If this was a WordPress plugin, the HTML output could read like everything else on the page. Sure, Google has all the data warehoused somewhere, maybe for search rank signals, but I still think it’s not an elegant solution. Maybe a WP plugin could pull in GFC member data via GFC’s API and output more palatable HTML, but a) I haven’t studied GFC’s API yet and b) it’s not a top priority for me right now.

For now, I’m going to sit back and see how many people join my site via GFC, as is. Let’s see how fast this network grows and see what people do with it.

—

Posted to Twitter: I think Google Friend Connect “gets” bloggers http://bit.ly/a5Yufx #googlefriendconnect #blogging #wordpress #foaf #gravatar #mybloglog

  every 1698s, 1s ago, in 0.03s.