I have released a gadget called Friend Introducer that lets FriendConnect members write introductions for their friends. It's displayed on the left side of this blog, so if you're already a member, please give it a try! (And if you aren't yet, feel free to join and try it out!)

What is FriendIntroducer? #

It mainly consists of three views. The first is the profile view displayed directly on the blog.

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It shows up to 5 introductions written for FriendConnect members. It supports pagination, and the introductions written for each member are displayed at random.

Clicking on a member's thumbnail switches to the detail view (though it's not an OpenSocial view per se). (* Edit to avoid confusion: "detail view" is just what I call it personally; in OpenSocial terms, it's still a profile view.)

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Since multiple people might write introductions for a single person, the detail view lets you browse all the introductions written about that user.

Clicking the button at the top of the gadget switches to the canvas view.

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In the canvas view, you can write introductions for the logged-in user's friends. If you don't have any friends yet, add someone on the same FriendConnect instance as a friend first!

How to add FriendIntroducer to your blog #

First, sign up for FriendConnect here. Once your site is registered...

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Click on "Social gadgets".

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Click the "Custom gadget" link at the very bottom.

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Set the Gadget URL to: http://devlab.agektmr.com/OpenSocial/FriendConnect/FriendIntroducer.xml

Adjust the gadget's width, click "Generate Code", and HTML code will be generated for you to paste into your blog or website.

Thoughts #

As I mentioned in a previous post, the key points of building a FriendConnect gadget are:

  • The OWNER is a virtual persona—the blog itself
  • You can navigate back and forth between the canvas view and profile view using requestNavigateTo
  • The canvas view background can be customized by editing the canvas.html imported during site setup

That pretty much sums it up.

For now, OpenSocial doesn't have a built-in concept of "communities," but it might be easier to understand FriendConnect as a community-oriented application with a clever twist.

Also, an interesting aspect of FriendConnect is that it allows you to merge and use friend lists imported from multiple social networks. For example, I have imported friends from orkut, Google, Plaxo, and Twitter; if someone registered on the same blog is my friend on any of those social networks, they become my friend on FriendConnect as well.

Someday, if Google turns iGoogle into a full-fledged social network, we might be able to use these merged friend lists directly there too.