Google Friend Connect Social Toolbar Features

Google Friend Connect on Wednesday added a “social bar” that lets webmasters consolidate Friend Connect features. Google offical site released a post “Google Friend Connect introduces the social bar”

“The social bar concentrates many of the basic social functions into a small strip at the top or bottom of your webpage,” Christopher Wren, a software engineer for Google Friend Connect wrote in a blog post. “You can use it to complement your existing gadgets and put it on as many or as few of your webpages as you want.”

Friend Connect lets webmasters add Google social features like chat to their Web sites with just a few clicks. It was first introduced in May as a closed beta, and was made publicly available in December.

Once installed, the social bar “offers a snapshot of the activity taking place on your Web site,” according to Google.

The bar can be added to existing gadgets or be displayed on its own. To add, webmasters just paste a snippet of code to the body of their site’s HTML. The bar can include a sign-in option, a snapshot of site activity, a wall gadget to discuss the site, and a view of other members that are on the site.

That one feature that will make many websites a virtual hotbed of social activity is the comment box. The comment box in Google Friend Connect can help you in two very important ways:

1. Allow others to comment on your website - It allows others to leave comments on specific pages of your website. Those comments will serve to help you optimize your content and rank in the search engines for related keywords.
2. Allows you to leave comments on other people’s websites - Because Google Friend Connect is an Open Social application that can be used by anyone, you can move freely about through the Web and leave comments on other people’s websites, leaving back links as you go. This will do you wonders for off-page SEO and if you use the right anchor text your back links you stand a real good chance of pushing your important pages up in the SERPs.

Through Friend Connect, you can already do things like comment on sites, become friends with other users on sites, and use some simple applications. The toolbar is another small step in Google’s effort to provide social data everywhere.

To add the social bar to your site, just head over to Google Friend Connect, log in, select your site, click on “social bar,” customize your options, and generate your code. The HTML code can be then placed anywhere within the body of your site’s HTML.

Developers can place the toolbar on the top or bottom of any web page on a site.

You can also read related posts:

• Trying out the Google Friend Connect social bar
• Google Launches “Social Bar”, Competes With Facebook’s Link Bar
• Google’s new social toolbar lets web sites add simple social features
• Google Friend Connect gets a handy toolbar