San Francisco — If you have executed Google Friend Connect on your blogs or websites, now you would either feel happy or get bothered by the new features that Google rolled out. Google on Wednesday unveiled some new features for Google Friend Connect, aimed at allowing website owners make their GFC experience more personalized and letting their visitors get to know each other.
Friend Connect now establishes a new segment called “Interests” that allows Web publishers ask questions that will encourage your visitors to interact with each other as well as communicate with you about their likes, hobbies and preferences.
“For instance, if you have a music website, you might ask people to share their favorite bands, the last concert they attended, or where they find new music,” Google wrote in a blog post. “Or if you run a hiking site, you can ask them about a favorite hike or national park.”
Visitors to Web sites who utilizes Google Friend Connect will soon have the choice of filling out a profile on that site that can connect them to like-minded individuals who dominate those sites. Those who visits the site will see these questions and answer them the moment they enter your site. The questions could be anything that will elicit valuable information about your site visitors. They can then search for other profiles on that site with matching tags, introduce themselves to those users through the site without having to post an e-mail address, and see content on the site tailored to their interests, said Mussie Shore, product manager for Google Friend Connect.
Webmasters will be able to view all these data entered by their members in a new “Community Data” section of their account. With that data, they can then create custom-made newsletters that can be dispatched out to all members or a specific segment based on the answers they provided.
On the back-end, this will also allow webmasters to provide customized links to people based on their responses, as well as ads through AdSense. All the data that people share on Friend Connect are reusable and exportable to other systems. All the more reason why people will most likely not use Friend Connect.
The whole concept behind the Google Friend Connect tool “is to make it easy for web publishers to add social features to their site without having coding capabilities,” Shore said. Google offers several services for Web publishers like this one, such as Google Web Elements.
The new capabilities expand on ones introduced last year. Google Friend Connect publishers can now deliver extremely targeted AdSense ads to individual visitors depending on the choices they announce on their profile page. Currently, about 9 million sites use Friend Connect.