connecting

I have added a Google Friend Connect plugin to this blog. That means that you can use Google, Yahoo!, or AOL accounts to sign in to add comments. Established sites are converting from static HTML to more interactive sites and many new sites are starting with Content Management Systems (CMS). This has made managing multiple accounts securely a real chore. Many people choose several ID/password combinations and re-use them for many sites. Allowing authorization from a core group of popular sites is progress!

I used the WordPress plugin that you can download from Google. The installation wasn’t exactly simple — you have to edit one of the PHP files and you need to have FTP access to your site. You need to get your site ID to make things work too. About the best way to do that is to go through the process of adding a gadget, then copy the ID from the code that is generated. Guess now that I know where to find the codes for other Google products this was a bit frustrating. There was sufficient information in the forum and wiki though to carry on. The only glitch that I saw was that the fonts in the theme I used had the defaults removed. I just clicked the reset button on Appearance > Theme options and they came back.

For quite a while I have been automatically importing posts from my hosted WordPress to Facebook as Notes using this blog’s RSS feed. People seem fairly comfortable posting comments within Facebook, but then they don’t show up where the post originated. There is a WordPress plugin that allows import of the comments from Facebook Notes back to a WordPress blog to add to the original post. The plugin worked well, however I disabled it and removed all the comments except ones that I made myself and which made sense in context.

I suspect that a lot of people don’t appreciate that there are automatic ways to pull their comments outside Facebook where they are viewable and searchable in the internet.

It seems in general that there is a lack of understanding of who all sees what on Facebook anyway. I posted to an established Facebook Group about the new Google Group with directions for requesting membership and asked that anyone who signed up send me the ID they chose privately so I would know who they were. One of the responses came as a Wall post! Thinking back though, it took me quite a while to figure out how to check my Inbox.

Automatic importing of your own posts from one social site to another is convenient. Right now I do status updates to identi.ca by way of Jabber clients (iChat and Psi). They transfer to Twitter then go from Twitter to Plaxo and Facebook. While the interconnectivity is convenient, you don’t want to stuff to start looping.