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...initiative is called Friend Connect and it begins tonight when any site can apply to be in the Google pilot program (they call it a "preview release") here. Note: that site won't be live until Monday night. During the next few days, Google will choose one or two dozen sites to participate. Over the course of the next several months, the company will collect site, user and developer feedback on how the program is working. Then, if all goes well, in a few months Google will open up Friend Connect to any website or blog that wants to participate...
...wife and I have a teensy blog that covers real estate and other stuff of interest to people in our hometown in Northern California. It's hosted via Blogger, which happens to be Google's free hosting service. (The Friend Connect program, however, is open to any website or blog - you'll just have to cut and paste a few lines of code onto your site.) Anyway, when we first set up the blog, we chose from a short a la carte menu of standard features we wanted to add - things like "blogrolls" which recommend our favorites blogs, post archives...
...Once Friend Connect is up and running on blogs, however, we'll be able to go to a page and choose from thousands of applications, and add them, free, to our site. (Here's a list of some of the applications. As Friend Connect grows, expect the list of applications to explode; Google, like Facebook before it, is trying to create a "platform" for developers to make money by reaching an audience of millions...
...they want to use all those cool new apps. How? Google's using a standard known as OpenID, which many of the world's biggest sites - from Google (of course) to AOL - utilize. So, for instance, sign into AOL, or your g-mail account, and you're logged into Friend Connect. One of the advantages of this system is it makes it easier for users to take their friend lists with them. Having signed in, users can follow the activities of their friends on Friend Connect sites. So, in my real estate blog example, if I installed a Wall...
...from Gaza will inevitably land in a crowded Negev school yard. And they worry that Palestinian suicide bombers will once again explode in the buses and cafès of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. "We used to think that every year we survived was a miracle, a gift," an Israeli friend confides gloomily, "but now all I think about are the threats ahead...