San Francisco — Google on Wednesday embarked on a social networking race to supplant Facebook as the dominant social graph, launched a new Google Friend Connect feature that is designed to help web site publishers and users to add a collection of social widgets to their pages via an embedded navigation bar.
FriendConnect, the Google service that offers data portability in a way for people to control the information and content they enter at social networking sites and social media-sharing sections of Web sites, which obviates the need to manually update multiple accounts, has gained a new feature that combines the basic social media functions in a toolbar that can be added to Web pages.
The “Social Bar,” as Google addresses it, assigns functions like logging in, editing profiles and settings, activity streams display and discussion wall postings into a strip that can be placed at the top or bottom of Web pages, Google said Wednesday. People can expand the view of each function by clicking on it.
The toolbar consists of buttons that, when clicked on, reveal drop-down windows showing you your own user identity, the activity taking place on the site (such as a link to a new blog post on a blog), comments, lists of other members on the site, and your own activity on any site that uses Friend Connect.
For example, one idea of data portability calls for people to have an online dashboard of their social information and content — friends lists, photos, video clips, blog items — that would be independent from any individual site. From there, people can control what information and content they post where, avoiding data lock-in.
In order to access the toolbar, usersmust first sign into Friend Connect using your user identity from Google or any other Connect-connected service.
“While it is effortless to add social features to your site with Google Friend Connect, you may have been wondering where to put all of the great gadgets,” said Google software engineer Christopher Wren in a blog post.
Facebook users would instantly distinguish the mechanics: They see a similar Facebook-branded navigation bar appear atop a new page when they click on an external link posted by another Facebook user. It serves to keep Facebook users inside Facebook, at least mentally, while viewing content on external Web sites.
Google is advocating the new bar as an option to putting some of the other Friend Connect page elements on your site. For instance, having this installed without the other widgets can keep the side navigation clear while still offering users the opportunity to log-in using their Friend Connect credentials. It also empowers them to see who is currently been on the page, and what those users have been interacting with.
Developers can put the toolbar on the top or bottom of any web page on a site. You can watch below an instructional video of how to drop it into your blog: