Google Goes Social Bar Hopping

Google’s latest venture into the social networking scene is a toolbar it’s introducing today that shows users’ social data on other web sites.  It’s designed to help website owners and users make better use of Google Friend Connect, a service that lets developers add social features to websites.

The toolbar includes buttons that, when clicked, will display a drop-down window showing you your own user identity, the activity currently taking place on the site, comments, lists of other members on the site, and your own activity on any other website that uses Friend Connect.  In order to use the toolbar, you’ll need to sign into Friend Connect using your user identity from Google or any other Connect-based service like Twitter.

Through Friend Connect, you can already do things like comment on sites, become friends with other users on sites, and use some simple applications. The toolbar is another small step in Google’s effort to provide social data everywhere.

Developers can place the toolbar on the top or bottom of any web page on a site. Here’s a sample. More in this instructional video:

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