"It would be helpful if they would make some kind of home base for
people to
manage their Friend Connect activity"
Click on your own avatar and you can see all your activity - sites
you've joined, people you've friended, etc.
Before you all start poo-pooing GFC because you don't get any/much
traffic from it, let me paste what I wrote on a different thread here
ages ago:
- Enter Google Friend Connect. I haven't used it yet, but basically,
it gives all of us the ability to add social networking functionality
to our sites just by copying and pasting some code. So if 100 of us
all agreed to add a Google Friend Connect widget to our sites and made
the effort to join all those sites we'd suddenly have 100 avatars
showing up in our sidebars. Then by the nature of "viral marketing",
those 100 "friends" should turn into 200 as connections from our
various social networks like Facebook join sites that we've joined and
so on.
I think the "Invite your friends" option is pretty poor at the moment
- which is a shame, but nevertheless, the theory is that by inviting
friends from Facebook, etc., you can introduce new people to our
network who may otherwise not have known about it.
As for Deas' comment about it just being a box of faces, well it is.
It's a list of your site's members and their social information, but
only *they* can use other widgets you add to your site like the Wall
gadget, with hopefully better ones to come.
I'm very optimistic about it. There are 43 members in the box on my
site, so that means there are 43 people floating around the web
indirectly promoting my site. It cost me nothing except some space on
my sidebar. And if I think It's ugly, I can always switch it for a
much smaller "Sign In" gadget instead.
So let's give this a go, eh? One big push later this week - signing up
for everyone's widgets, adding as friends, asking Twitter followers to
join your widget, visiting the sites of people in your widget, and
actively searching out other GFC widgets for blogs outside our own
group.
Remember, Google Friend Connect is just a tool. It's how we use it
that makes it worthwhile, or worthless.