Google Friends – Replace Mailpress?

I have as you can see, recently added Google friends, features on my website.  I am seriously amazed at the amount of features that Google was able to stuff this thing with. First of all Google Friends is not a a simple widget -which is what I thought it would be- it is a service that provides a variety of widgets for your site, in fact with all these widgets placed in your sidebar you could probably get 67% of Facebook’s functionality on your website.

Visitors that already have Google accounts do not need to sign up up again, they can simply use their Google account, same  goes for visitors who have Twitter, Yahoo, AIM, and Open ID accounts. I find this to be an amazing feature since few visitors have the time and patience to stay and sign up for some other service. In fact the way that many of google’s products are interconnected has made them very efficient.

That’s great but what does Google Friends actually do? Well, Google friends helps your visitors connect with each other; for example if you install all the right widgets you can let visitors post comments and ratings, add suggestions, add their profile, etc. There is no doubt that google is probably working on a chat widget which would allow online visitors to chat with each other, of course these chatting services exist but they look un-professional and and are not as customizable.

Anther amazing little feature that I really love about Google Friends is that you can ask questions on-sign or with the poll widget, but these are not just multiple choice, you can write check box type questions or text response question. The reason this is so valuable is because, this slow starts to close the gap of visitor to admin, thusly allowing visitors to give feedback in an easy and orderly  manner.

Google Friends also allows you to gather statistics about your Google Friends members on your site, stuff like how many members you have and how many new members you have will automatically be kept track of.

Google Friends also allows the admin to send newsletters to all of his/her members. This is useful but if you already have MailPress it is useless, since Google friends can yet send nice HTML looking e-mails it will rank lower than Mailpress on the Newsletter side. For people that don’t have MailPress and are not Computer savy, I recommend trying Google Friends before you attempt to use MailPress, since the Google Friends Newsletter system is easier to manage. you may have noticed I have taken the MailPress newsletter widget down , this should only be temporary until I do some touch ups in my MailPress system.

The only other downside to Google Friends is that it can clutter your sidebar if you use to many features, so just choose a few and stick with them, I would say no more than 3. In this way you keep your website looking nice and clean.

In conclusion I think this was yet another great job Google was able to achieve. I would say get, Google Friends for your site as soon as possible. It will add a new layer of interactivity to your site which I think many users will enjoy.

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