Friend Connect - How the Google Digg Love Child Affects You

Friend connect is cleverly disguised as a so-called widget titled "Followers" and released on google's blogspot blogger domain. This is most likely a response to the broken down negotiations between Google and Digg.

As you may know Google was just a hair away from purchasing Digg and integrating its data and results into search results. This would supposedly improve the search listings but at the 11 hour negotiations broke down and the Googlers left the table seemingly walking away forever.

You can see an example of what it looks like on some blogger blogs. Do a search for friend connect followers widget on blogger and that should give you a good start.

When you go to a page which has the widget you have the opportunity to become what is called a "follower". You can see the widget and the pictures of the current followers avatars at the upper left of the page or upper right depending on the template being used on that blog.

There is no way to tell at this point whether Google will use the number of followers and how long people read your blog posts as factors for increasing or decreasing your ranking in big G's search results.

It may just be the G men of search following their standard MO by mostly secretly under cover of night releasing this. This is about par for the course for the googlers.

Friend connect is only found on certain blogspot blogs right now basically the bloggers in the know on how to install it. It is available to all blogger blogs just most people don't know about it because of the launch secrecy and many people on blogger are newbies and amateurs who don't know how easy it is to install the widget.

I believe you have to be logged into your account to be able to follow blogs. (Sidenote: I also recommend putting in a good photo of yourself into your google account). Depending on what you're going to be using your big G profile for the photo should reflect this. Obviously business photo should be more professional and if you're going to be using it mostly personal you can certainly throw up a wacky photo of yourself. I leave that part up to you

Confirm the settings you want because you're in control of how you get your content. You can join publicly and your picture will show same as it does on the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets.

Or you can join "anonymously" and just receive the updates without being seen. This is the very cool part about friend connect because it keeps you in complete control of what content you get and how you get it.

I join blogs publicly and recommend you do the same because you're part of the community and want to be participating in the discussions and being seen by other members.

Next, click one of the avatars of those who have already joined and add the person as a friend and send them an introductory blurb. This will give you a fledging taste of using friend connect as your first baby steps. Obviously, I've taken the time to talk about this with you because I believe it is going to be a huge part of the web going forward.

I'll be talking about this more in my Facebook research. The process of adding friends here and making true connections is the same as it is on FB. This is true for any and all social networks because the underlying key is the "social" aspect.

There are some basic fundamentals to make you much more successful in meeting new people and making new connections. Deepening those connections will be the key but beyond the scope of this article.

The next screen you will see after clicking on their photo is their profile, links to their social networks and their G Reader shared items. This is big G's social bookmarking application.

For those of you who do not know how to use Google Social, called Googling Social, I have instructions to create a profile, add friends to it from Gmail and get started with the Reader which is the social bookmarking application.

Currently, the links to get to the pieces of Googling Social are hard to find so the best starting point is someone elses profile, you can find mine in the resource box at the bottom of this article.

Once you are on my profile page, look in the upper right hand corner of the page, the link is "my profile" and it is just to the right of your gmail address. Assuming he you're logged into your account it will take you to a screen after you click on the my "profile link" where you can set up your own profile.

Sidenote: it looks like big G is starting to index these profiles in their main search engine index. So be aware of this privacy reasons and also as a predictor of how influential their social platform will be in their 2009 search engine results.

Word of warning, the Gmail address that you are logged into will be your public Gmail address in Reader and how you make friends thru Gmail. So if you have a private address then don't use it. Use one you're ok being public (despite G's best efforts some spam bots maybe able to harvest your address and spam you).

You only get one profile no matter how many Gmail addresses you have, so choose wisely.

If you have any questions you can email me from my contact page on my site also in the resource box.

You make friends in this system by first initiating an e-mail. And then your new friend has to reply back to your e-mail.

This does a couple of things which are beyond the scope of this article but the main one you need to know about now is the more friends you have the more follow links you'll get to your website. If you don't know followed links are very important to your Google, Yahoo, and MSN rankings.

After you've made the initial e-mail contacts and gotten a reply back from your new friend, then invite your new friend to Gchat by clicking the link at the bottom of the email communication you had with them. At that point you'll be connected. The friending process is made purposefully difficult to insure there's a 2 way connection and cut down on spam which is a good thing for all of us.

This is WIN WIN. The more friends you have in this the better it works for you; and everyone in your network.

This will be huge so jump into the deep end now and be an early adopter dominator.

Stay tuned for more info about the big G's big changes to their social platform, how the new search results will show (hint: personalized), and how you can profit from it the whitehat way.

Seed Newsvine

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