Google Friend Connect versus Facebook Connect is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’ve been a huge fan of Google since I was first introduced to the search engine as early as 1998. I just knew that access to information was key to the success of the internet and Google was right there with the most accurate results available.

Since then lots has changed online and new players like Facebook, Myspace and others are all vying to be your one in alll soplution to things online. Google has had the advantage for a long time but things may be shifting. facebook is putting up huge numbers and the number one social network is becoming a force to be recognized in the big eague world of online service providers.

I began to consider opening up my blog to new members by trying out one of the new login services available and chose to integrate both Facebook Connect and Google Friends Connect so that more of my friends can easily access my blog and websites for comments and possibly in the future to offer private or upgraded memberships to exclusive content.

Running this blog on the WordPress platform makes it much easier to work with these new services and I was actually able to get both services to work with the existing installation. I must admit it was much easier to get the Google Friends Connect to work “out of the box” and with a simple WordPress plugin I was up and running with some new commenting from my Google network.

Linking my WordPress blog with Facebook Connect was a bit trickier and I have found some minor issues with logins to the site using this service. I was keen on the Facebook Connect integration because it should allow more fans and friends to share my blog content with other networks with the hopeful benefit of increasing our readership. I think Facebook is better suited for sharing and would be a better service for my website purpose of driving traffic and more users to our site network but it would help if it were a more fluid process. I think some better documentation from plugin writers is needed to explain exactly how to set these things up if more people are going to adopt the Connect service but it will most likely be the more popular as search engines become less important and social networks rise as the new go to source for instant information.

It’s Google Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect – PC World

Just hours after Yahoo announced a planned implementation of Facebook Connect on its network of sites, Google announced that you can now use your Twitter credentials to register on Google Friend Connect sites. Friend Connect and Facebook Connect are both a means to quickly register for a site or service that requires a login, and it’s likely no coincidence they announced competing deals on the same day. This could end up being a hard fought battle, because there’s one major reason one-stop online identity is becoming important as we enter 2010, and that reason is paywalls.

Technorati Tags: google, facebook, facebook connect, google friends, friend connect

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Aggregate your social networks with Lifestream WordPress plugin is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

The social web has gotten out of control with most power users having upwards of 10 or more social profiles to manage. Not only do we have MySpace and Facebook but many web professionals have LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon or Reddit accounts to manage. If you like pictures you probably have a Flickr account and maybe you use Picasa for web albums. If you listen to music you may have iLast.fm to go with your Zune card or maybe you’re a simple kind of person and you just have MSN or GMAIL as your contacts manager.

If you are reading this blog then odds are you have all of these and more to manage and bringing it all together in one place is kinda cool. The wordppress plugin Lifestream makes this happen and keeps all your social activity in one location with a few simple clicks. Your social feed can be used as an online resume with a history of everything you do online as a bit of job history for those of us who live and work online.

My Lifestream shows you that I spend much of my time online reading news sites and promoting stories from not only my own websites but the millions of other websites I read each day. I use my del.icio.us account to list my favorite urls and my Facebook account includes links to lots of this as well. I’m looking forward to see what new social networking opportunities my Facebook account brings to me once I start using the new Facebook Connect feature.

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My Lifestream is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Lifestream is a wordpress plugin which allows me to link all of my social networks and the activity in each account to my blog with a page to display a summary of my actions. My Lifestream is published here and contains my Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Mixx, Magnolia, YouTube, StumbleUpon and the many other social services I now have. Just listig them all has reminded me that i need to update a few of my profiles with the latest information.

Whats the reason for this? Well I’m interested in using this blog as an announcement platform for a social marketing service I want to build and I am linking this blog up to all of my social networks. I am hoping to develop a port of this blog to be used for music promotion and band management. I have a number of artists who have asked me to develop an online promotion tool and this is part of that. So look for more blog posts each day with an update of my social network activity. This may be a big part of my blogging on this site for awhile. Enjoy!

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Google Sitemaps plugin for WordPress is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I have been gaming the search engines as a search engine marketer or seo consultant for quite a few years now. The game has always been about Google for me and I was happy to pick up great results in major engines like Yahoo and MSN as a bonus. The reasons are obvious, Google has the greatest volume of traffic and even better is that I have found it converts better for me as well.

When I began building WordPress blogs and customizing them for better search engine results I had no idea of the number of great add ons or “plugins” as they are called. Using a site like WP Plugins I have found an incredible assortment of plugins designed for seo and all of them are great but I think one of the better ones I use now has to be the Google Sitemaps plugin.

For the first few years of my seo work a sitemap and proper internal navigation were lots of work. I manually updated most of my pages and whenever I wanted to make changes there was a lot of repetitive copy paste. Maintaining a proper sitemap was an important chore. Organizing hundreds of individual pages and keeping track of things like url changes or modifying anchor text was a real pain. This handy little tool takes the guess work out of building a decent sitemap for Google.

Google recognizes a specific Sitemap Protocol as described here:

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. The protocol was written to be highly scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size. It also enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The Google Sitemap Protocol has recently been accepted by both Yahoo and MSN as an industry standard. You can view more details and the latest version of Sitemap Protocol 0.9 at http://www.sitemaps.org/

Installing the Google Sitemaps plugin for WordPress from http://www.arnebrachhold.de was as easy as uploading the file and clicking Activate. The plugin installs and configures itself to produce an updated sitemap.xml file in your root directory every time you post to your blog. Whether adding a new post or page the sitemap automatically updates and includes your entry for the search engines to conveniently read in a standardized format. Thats simply sweet by itself but it also pings the google servers to let them know whats up.

Thats the best thing I ever heard of as far as seo tools goes. I mean that. What other tool can be more valuable? The goal has always been to get Google to recognize my content and properly index it. Now we have a tool that will notify Google I have just posted this lovely unique article to my blog and they can run over and check it out, cache a copy and label it as mine before any content scrapers can steal my work and claim it as their own. Google gets exactly what they want, fresh update and unique content from a now known and trusted source. Outside of some keyword research, which I never really bother with, proper content formatting and succesful organic link building I could do no more for my site as far as seo work is concerned. Can I?

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