501derful.org
This is a follow up and the second part of yesterday’s post on this topic. Here are some Beta Test Results we did with Facebook Connect. These are results from real people who tried it out:
“When I click that (Facebook) button, most of the box is hidden behind the video adjacent to the button on the page so I can’t read the prompts?”
“It went nuts, looping through some sort of loading process and back to FISpace homepage. I closed the FireFox tab, but it continued cycling when I relaunched FISpace. Had to relaunch the browser.”
“It worked but when I went to edit my profile it was all in Spanish”
Hmmm. And the results for Google Connect?
“I joined. It was easy”
“I joined and invited some people”
“I joined but what’s the point?”
Hmmmm. Once again the results speak for themselves. The last question come to the heart of the matter for non-profits. What is the point? With Google Friend Connect there is no programming experience required to get it going on your site. However you are limited to just what you can do with it, at least for now. But we are sure as time goes on there will be more and more features added to it which you can take advantage of. And as with most Google products, many of those features will become available on your site without you having to do anything. In a way, that’s the beauty of Google services, code once and you are done.
With Facebook Connect there are virtually unlimited options, but as you probably already guessed – you need to be a coder. So if you are comfortable with coding (or are a non-profit that has a programmers), then by all means go for Facebook Connect. However, if you are patient, wait a few weeks or months and I’m sure ready made modules will come out for popular services like Moveable Type, Joomla, etc. to help you implement This application with little or no programming knowledge required.
So our recommendation is this – if you have a supported application such as WordPress, or are a programmer, then install both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect – you’ll get the most reach with the least amount of effort.
If you don’t have a supported app, or handy access to programming skills, just install Google Friend Connect now. And experiement. That’s what it’s all about.
Proof that Google Friend Connect is advancing – they recently added twitter integration – now you can invite your twitter friends. Plus there are other networks you can interact with. For example, if you sign up/in, you can share sites via facebook
Have to make a political kind of comment. I don’t like the way Facebook is going its own proprietary way. We need to bring platforms together, not create more captive camps of users.
I agree with David – Google did try to get Facebook on board – and they were for a while. But politics came in and they went their own way. Too bad.