Strengthening a worldwide community with Google Friend Connect

Site owners often tell us that to build strong communities on the web, they have to be a jack-of-all-trades. With Google Friend Connect, we want to empower any website to awaken their community, even if the site owner doesn't have the technical background or the time to build social features from scratch.

Today we're launching an enhanced comments gadget. With this gadget, visitors from all over the world can leave messages in their native tongue, and other viewers will be able to instantly translate these comments into the language of their choice. For websites like Earth Hour, where people from many countries are working together to conserve energy, this comments gadget offers users a new way to engage in more meaningful discussions, regardless of what language they speak. Watch the video below to learn more:



The comments gadget is just one way Friend Connect can help webmasters foster deeper interactions between site members. You may have seen that over the past few weeks we have added several new gadgets to the Friend Connect gallery, all with the goal of helping people interact with one another on the sites they enjoy. These gadgets include the event gadget for promoting an upcoming event and letting members indicate if they're attending, as well as two gadgets built by OpenSocial developers: the Polls gadget, which gives opinion polls a social twist, and the Get Answers gadget, which lets members ask questions to the community and answer questions posted by others.

To learn more about these gadgets, or to keep your eye out for future gadgets we will be rolling out for Friend Connect, please visit the Social Web Blog.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect