Google Friend Connect - Web 2.0 for All

Google has done it again, with another groundbreaking landmark in the development of the Internet.

They have made the entire Internet into a Giant Social Network.

They have created a way that any website can have social networking type features added to it instantly.

These features will allow your visitors to join your site, browse and interact with friends on your website and invite all their friends from most of the top Social Networks creating a constant viral stream of targeted personally invited people to your site.

I am sure everybody was wondering how the whole Internet was going to be upgraded to Web 2.0 standards, well Google have created yet another "Copy and Paste" solution by creating Google Friend Connect.

Google Friend Connect is quite simply a selection of social networking features in the form of gadgets that you can add to any existing website by simply copying and pasting the code for the various gadgets into your web pages.

The main set of social gadgets includes:

• Member management - allowing control over the members of the site

• Message board - allowing people to leave comments

• Picture-sharing - allowing people to share pictures

• Reviews - allowing people to write reviews

The members gadget is the key gadget that brings it all together by creating the viral traffic aspect and provides these core social features:

• The ability to sign-in with a existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account

• The ability to invite and show activity to existing friends from social networks

• The ability to browse member profiles across social networks

• The ability to connect with new friends on your site

These are only the core gadgets that Google has released but not long ago they released OpenSocial Gadgets allowing 3rd party developers to create gadgets with a common API for social applications across multiple websites, that can similarly be copied and pasted into a site creating a huge amount of Web 2.0 social and functional features that can be instantly added to any site.

The Fact is that this is going to change Everything and I mean Everything!

This is Going to change web design, SEO, Internet marketing, online sales and even social interaction itself.

This is going to create huge opportunities for everybody, some of the obvious people who will benefit from this will be:

• Website owners will benefit from automatic and increasing free traffic to their sites increasing sales of products or advertising served such as Google AdSense.

• Coders and developers will benefit from developing new Open Social Gadgets for them selves or clients.

• Internet marketers who will benefit from finding new ways of internet marketing and generating large amounts of traffic with these new viral social features.

• Web designers are the main market that Google has targeted Friend Connect at since they are expected to be the work force that will add these features to the entire web. Consider for a second that 99% of the web is not Web 2.0 enabled and that if you are not a web designer then perhaps you might consider becoming one very quickly considering on how lucrative that position just became over night by being able to effectively add the gadgets to peoples websites?

What ever you do, it would be wise to be one step ahead...

The new order of the day is Quality of Design, Functionality and Content. This is the most valuable thing to focus on now because it doesn't help having these viral social features if nobody likes your website or wants to invite their friends to it.

With such a big change in how the internet works we are bound to see some new and amazing things emerge.

The following videos made by Google show examples and explain everything in detail.