New York — Google Inc. on Monday said that its new Google Friend Connect service, which connects social-networking features into participating sites, has now been integrated with Twitter.
“This indicates that now you will be able to Tweet from any Friend Connect-supported site.”
“This means that now, when you link to 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,” explains Google Friend Connect Product Manager Mussie Shore.
“With Google Friend Connect, Twitter folks will be able to bump into and recognize each other out there on the web — and discover new people to follow on Twitter,” says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone on the Twitter Blog.
Twitter was one of the launching partners for the MySpace Data Availability service, now called as MySpaceID.
That has yet to launch, but MySpace has utilized Google Friend Connect to power the standard, so this could be a sign that it is still on the way. This looks like a great way to increase your network and start up conversations with like-minded individuals without sharing all of your personal photos!
Another great feature with Twitter on Google Friend Connect is that you can choose to use your Twitter avatar and profile description. To add your Twitter friends, all you need to do is go to your Google Profile on a site that supports Google Friend Connect and click on “Add/Remove”.
To add your Twitter friends into your Google profile, just head to the profile page and click on Basics, where you can add Twitter to your profile. Once you give Google your Twitter username and password, the site will pull in all your Twitter friends.
The moment that is done, any time you visit a Friend Connect enabled site and sign in, the widget will pull out and highlight the people you already know through Twitter.
To send a tweet at a site using Friend Connect:
Click on the “invite” link that stays in most Friend Connect widgets, a popup window will open where you can click “share” and then 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.
“This integration with Twitter is an example of how we want to continue improving Friend Connect, extending the open social web and bringing social features to more places on the web,” says Shore.
Certainly, the final integration would be the ability to see your Facebook friends in your Google profile (and vice versa), but thanks to Facebook’s closed door approach with Facebook Connect, that sort of social nirvana is not likely to happen any time soon.
Assuming Twitter’s recognition and massive user base, Google’s various Friend Connect widgets just got a whole lot more appealing to site developers, and that in turn could mean some gains for Google in the race to provide portable social tools on the larger web.