Google has added a new “Social Bar” to its repertoire of Friend Connect social widgets for your website. The Social Bar adds a toolbar along either the top or bottom of a webpage, allowing visitors to login and see what other Friend Connect users have been doing on your site.
The widget doesn’t offer any exciting new features, but it does give site owners a way to use Friend Connect without sacrificing precious sidebar real estate to Google’s widgets. For an example of the Social Bar in action, check out Google’s demo site.
In fact, bars along the top or bottom of site seem to be the emerging design choice for integrating outside social tools into your website. The Glue plugin for Firefox (see the Webmonkey review) and Facebook’s ever-present bottom toolbar use a very similar approach.
In Google Friend Connect’s case the Social Bar address one of the main criticisms of the service — it offers little in the way of customization. The older widgets are very prominently Google-branded and lack site-specific personalities.
The new toolbar improves the options for site owners by offering a way around the potential design clash of other Google Friend Connect widgets — the toolbar stays out of the way at the top or bottom of the page.
But the new Friend Connect Social Bar also emphasizes one of the chief differences between the Friend Connect approach and that of its main competitor — the Facebook Connect toolset.
In a nutshell, Google is going for the cut-and-paste widget approach, while Facebook Connect offers a more complex, but arguable richer tools for site developers to work with.
Facebook Connect, while somewhat more complicated to integrate into your site, offers more customization possibilities and, while still clearly branded as Facebook tools, can feel more like an extension of your site, rather than a cookie-cutter widget.
Still, Friend Connect is hard to beat when it come to ease-of-use for site developers, and the Social Bar could tip the balance for those sites that balked at giving up sidebar space to the old widgets.
And it probably won’t be long before Facebook starts moving into the widget game as well.
Look for more social toolbars to start popping up on a your favorite sites in the near future.
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