This Blog Is Now Connect’d

Let me first promise that this is my last post with the annoy­ing ‘d in the title!

Two days ago I spent about 15 min­utes set­ting up Google Friend Con­nect on my blog — I just wish it was more than a bunch of wid­gets and prob­a­bly Google is already work­ing on that. The process was sim­ple and pleasant.

Yes­ter­day it took me about the same time to also enable Face­book Con­nect here using Adam Hupp’s plu­gin called WP-FBConnect, which is the offi­cial one for Word­Press. The two other plu­g­ins seemed either too inva­sive (Socia­ble!) or too early in devel­op­ment (Com­mu­nity Face­book Con­nect by Jessy Stay). There is an offi­cial Face­book Con­nect Plu­gin Direc­tory now and, which seems to be actively updated.

I had to make a few minor tweaks to WP-FBConnect — the first and last names of users were not get­ting pop­u­lated in the data­base and the CSS did not match my theme well, but in gen­eral it was also sim­ple and pleas­ant experience.

What I find sad is that Yahoo! has failed to max­i­mize the full poten­tial of their MyBlogLog ser­vice — they’ve got all build­ing blocks nec­es­sary to offer a com­bi­na­tion of both Face­book Con­nect and Google Friend Con­nect — iden­tity, wid­gets, lifestream­ing, friends, com­mu­ni­ties, fol­low­ing. Oh, well… again and again, Yahoo! is let­ting com­peti­tors eat its own pie.