The ePro » Friend Connect http://www.epro.co.uk Pragmatic advice for getting the best from online tools Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:10:31 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Make your site social for freehttp://www.epro.co.uk/make-your-site-social-for-free/ http://www.epro.co.uk/make-your-site-social-for-free/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:58:00 +0000 James Docherty http://www.epro.co.uk/?p=16 Social media is a term you’ve probably heard but if you haven’t it broadly means allowing users to engage with website content and each other. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are known as social networking sites because their primary purpose is to allow people to make contact and share thoughts, comments & content. Other sites like The Guardian or YouTube allow comments to be added around their content thus making their content ‘social’. So why not let your website users comment on your content, share ideas & thoughts etc. In other words, use the features of social networking on your own website.

One of the ongoing annoyances for committed users of the web is the number of user profiles we need to create to engage with the all these websites. Fortunately, Google’s recently launched social networking platform, Friend Connect allows us to embed social networking tools into our websites without the need to ask users to create a new profile when they want to use the features.
Adding the various free widgets will allow you to create a plug & play community for your website without the barriers usually associated with setting up and using a social network. You won’t need any programing skills but you will need (ftp) access to your server to set it up.

Check out this intro video from Google:

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