501derful.org
Okay not so much WWE as much as W3C…. Recently myself and my good friend Rob Sullivan decided to see what the hype was all about between Google Friend Conncet and Facebook Connect. Which one actually does something for your non-profit? Which one is easy to implement? Which one is all fluff? So we picked some blogs we run (including this one) and had at it.
Before I get into our findings, let me tell you that we are not expert programmers. Rob and I can go through code to find things that could be fixed, and even fix some basic things in HTML, PHP and ASP, but neither of us can code from the ground up.
To quote Rob ” I believe Google Friend Connect is more non-programmer friendly. You simply log into the site, give it a few parameters and Google spits out a javascript code at you, just like if you were setting up and AdSense or Google Analytics account. Paste that code where you want the widget to appear on your page and voila! you have it on your site.”
Sounds easy enough huh? Score one for Google. Now heres what Rob said about Facebook Connect “With Facebook Connect, you need to be a programmer. Simple as that. However, with some packages (IE WordPress) someone has already built a Facebook Connect widget which you can install and download, however with others there isn’t such a program. That means, if you have a custom website, or one where you can’t find an already built package, then you are on your own.”
So now that we’ve talked about implementation let’s talk about features. Right now, there aren’t a lot of features available for Google Friend Connect. You can get a “sign in” gadget and a “members” gadget as well as a couple others. With the sign in and members gadgets you can do things like become friends with other “fans” of the site, as well as invite other people you know, provided they have a Google account. You can also share the site on services such as Facebook and Twitter.
With Facebook, because you have to build your application, to the options are endless. You can create a sign in module, then invite your friends and even share posts made on the site. But again, you have to build them. While there are samples and snippets of code out there it’s up to you to make them work.
So what’s my thoughts on these? Which is better? Find out tommorow as I report on what our Beta Testsers found out.
