The New Social Network With Google Friend Connect

Look out MySpace and Facebook, Google has decided to enter the social networking game. Google announced the launch last weekend and has just opened up beta testing to a select number of people. I think this is a great move by Google and will quickly become a contender in this space.

Google Friend Connect is a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Google Friend Connect boasts the following high-level features:
1.Attract more visitors to your site - Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.
2.Enrich your site with social features - Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.
3.No programming whatsoever - Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

4.There are a couple of demo sites already setup which you can test and interact with.If you’re interested in being part of the beta testing group, you can apply directly on their site here. I just applied today so hopefully I will get accepted and can start using Google Friend Connect on eBlog Templates.

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How Do You Decide Who to Follow on Twitter?

In a post before, I looked at some ways that I have used to get more followers on Twitter. Now I wanted to spin it around and look at some of the criteria I have for who I decide to follow on Twitter.

Let's say I've just clicked on an email notification from Twitter that someone has followed me. I click on the link and here's what I am looking for when I check out their profile:

• Their ratio of followers to people they are following. If I see it's about 1:1, that's good, but if I see that they are following 14,000 people and only have 237 following them back, that's a HUGE red flag.
  

• I check their bio. I'm hoping to get some sense of who they are and what they do.

• I check their avatar. Yes, a real pic of a real person matters.
  

• I check their most recent tweets. Specifically, I look for how many replies they have left. This gives me an idea of how they are using Twitter. If I see no replies on their profile, that tells me they are probably just on Twitter to broadcast (promote their own content with no/little desire to interact with other members). I prefer to follow people that are interested in conversing on Twitter.
  

• I check their location. I am currently trying to follow more people from Alabama and the South, so if their profile says this is where they are located, that's a plus.
  

Now what about people that I decide to follow that didn't follow me first? How do I find these people?

The quickest way for me to follow you is if I see someone that I am following talking to you. If you are engaging my friends in conversation, that's a wonderful way to get my attention, and it's like an 'endorsement'. Also, if you reply to me, that gets my attention, and makes it far more likely that I will want to follow you.

The bottom line is that I want to follow people that are on Twitter to interact with other people. That's how *I* use Twitter, you might have another system for picking the people you follow, and there's nothing wrong with that, in fact it's one of the beauties of social media, that there are so many different ways that we can all use these tools, based on our own needs.

What do you look for when deciding who you follow on Twitter? Read More..

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