As Google Friend Connect goes out of private beta, I thought I would provide some comments on Google’s new attempt to change how people interact on the web. I had a chance to integrate Goggle Friend Connect into my latest project, Billboard For The People, and gain some insight into where this service holds value, and how I think it should evolve in the future.

For those who don’t know already, Google Friend Connect (GFC, for brevity’s sake) is a plug-n-play social networking utility that can easily be integrated into websites, and allow visitors to sign in, “join” your site, spread it amongst friends, provide comments, etc. More can be read about GFC on their website.

Let me start with what is great about GFC. This service could not be more simple to integrate into an existing website, which can be a crucial feature in many contexts. In the case of Billboard For The People, which is a grassroots effort I developed with Hyperakt Design Group to raise money for a congratulatory billboard for president elect Barack Obama, two main constraints for the project were, of course, time and budget.  We were able to get GFC fully integrated into our site (and assume the sites aesthetic, more or less) within a few hours, and you can’t beat the price of ‘free.’

In the case of Billboard for the People, we instantly had a space where like-minded users could sign-in, provide comments, and potentially invite their Google contacts to join the site as well, and spread the site across various other social networks, such as Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. While we already had similar ‘spread’ features built into the site more prominently, an influx of over 3,000 visitors joining the site via GFC within two weeks is definitely significant, regardless of some percent of users just joining to check out Google’s new tool.

The difficulty with GFC is that it seems to be living in an odd state between common use cases… Full on designers and developers will most likely be frustrated by the limited ability for customization, or fully and seamlessly integrating the social features that GFC provides into an existing infrastructure. Hopefully we can look forward to some sort of full API that would allow GFC’s robust social networking framework to be exploited to it’s full potential in new and creative ways beyond just message boards.

This leaves GFC as an ideal tool for the amateur web developer/administrator/content manager. Unfortunately, this is where we encounter GFC’s second limitation, which is a disappointing lack of features. As of GFC’s launch into public beta, the only tools available are a message board and a review/rating system. So this is where the question of ‘who is this for?’ comes back up. Any amateur developer who might want to integrate GFC into their existing site potentially already has access to these types of features (comments/reviews) with platforms such as Wordpress, or any other free blogging, forum, or content management system. Until a range of features are available that would allow site visitors to really interact with each other, and promote increased visit durations and visitor loyalty, I can see a lot of room for development in GFC’s value potential.

Regardless, GFC was unquestionably an asset to the Billboard for the People project, so there are definitely situations where the lack of a full API and more features is out-shined by how easy GFC is to implement, and quickly add some basic social features to smaller scale websites.