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Google Friend Connect – An Epic Failure

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I have been using Google’s friend connect feature for a long time on my blog. Though I have 66 followers for my blog through friend connect as on date, the kind of traffic generated to my blog through this is miserable! In the last 12 months, my site had over 1,96,600 visitors from various sources. Of these, only 52 visits source was Google Friend Connect Module. That is a mere ~0.026%. So, now my question is – should I continue using it or simply remove and continue with any other alternative? What is your experience, have you ever got a chance to measure the performance of ‘Friend Connect’ module by Google?

You may be wondering how I arrived at those numbers. The source for the mentioned stats is Google Analytics. Yes, If you have an account on Google Analytics for your blog/site, you would know all these metrics including number of visits, unique visitors, number of pages viewed per visit, demographics of visitors, break up of browsers/OS, Average time on site, content overview and many more. I really like the analytical info provided by Google. Going back to the point of discussion, has Google failed to create a strong social network through friend connect?

In contrast to Google’s friend connect, I recently added Facebook Fan widget on my blog. It has been less than 2 weeks since I added this widget and I already have 41 subscribers via Facebook. More over Facebook is providing a very clean way of publishing the content and to socialize with subscribers in a much better way. Even the traffic sourced from facebook has been a number of times better!

Those of you who use blogspot as your blogging platform, Google friend connect is made a default widget in the sidebar. Though Google is trying to promote this product the most through its free blogging solution, I doubt the kind of socialization element provided to increase the effectiveness. At least I was on the verge of removing it a couple of times, still continuing to see if it can get any better. I presume the time has come to retire Google ‘friend connect’ stuff on my blog. I am planning to do so because of a number of reasons. First one being the slowness to load this module. When a user makes a request to my blog, it does multiple DNS lookups to fetch the module. Secondly, kill some more time in fetching & loading the images etc.,

May be an integration of Google Friend Connect with its own product ‘Reader‘ might help to certain extent. But, looking at the kind of effectiveness Facebook has offered through its fan pages, I am jumping over there! It may also be possible that I haven’t got the trick of getting Google friend connect to work for me. If you have seen considerable success, please share the tips :).

Since I am talking about socialization of blogs, let me take the liberty of showing some of the tools I have on my site. If you like any of the post, feel free to make use of any of the sharing options I have provided. Just below this article, you have options to share this article via ‘Yahoo! Buzz’, Facebook, Twitter, Email, Digg, stumbleupon and many more! Please do make use of these and share with others whenever you like a particular post. Oh yeah… you have an option to subscribe for email notification as well! look at the top of right sidebar, feel free to subscribe if you haven’t done that yet.

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Comments

  1. Google itself has abandoned Friends Connect for all non-blogger blogs. Google suggests to use G+ to muster audience for your blog. G+ and FB can really do wonders for your blog.

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  4. Though Google friend connect app in itself doesn’t provide us with great amount of traffic,other Google applications which are free has gifted us a lot. I am a great fan of Google freebies, because no other single company has gifted us so much as Google has.

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  5. I kinda disagree with the things you have mentioned.

    For one, Facebook is*not* a good mode of sharing. Agreed, it reaches out to more people because you have more friends on Facebook, but the stand that Facebook takes against an “open web” is atrocious.

    You share something in Facebook and it never leaves Facebook. You can never draw something OUT of Facebook, you can only push stuff into it. For example, have you tried sharing your Facebook notes/photo albums et al OUTSIDE facebook? you haven’t and you can’t!

    This is where Google reigns supreme. Fine, it doesn’t reach out to as many people, but the places it reaches out to, is far better and far more exposed than Facebook, WHICH helps in the long run.

    I have had personal experience of this. My blog has clocked over 100,000, and has page rank of 5. But all that is only because of Google. In fact, I recently deactivated my Facebook account and saw to my astonishment that traffic to my blog actually increased! Maybe my 700+ Facebook friends haven’t read my last post, but so many more people from around the world have.

    just my two cents, feel free to scrap 🙂

    signing off, Google-fanatic, forever. 🙂

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  7. You are right, and I quote what Mark Zuckerberg said on networking, “information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have.” That’s the power of FACEBOOK!

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  12. Thank you Mohan. Trying to create a promotion page for my blog at facebook. The post is really helpful and of course two is more than one! 🙂

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  16. My website (weebly) don’t allow google connect to integrate with it.. So facebook widget is the only source.. Since most of them use blogspot or wordpress GFC helps a lot I guess..
    Also to add nthg like these (GFC or Facebook widgets) matters after a while.. If the writer/blog is writing well/popular ppl are gng to follow anyways..
    Thats my opinion..
    Last but not the least, Mr.Mohan, its very well written post..

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    • Sorry, i have little knowledge on weebly. That is true.. there are always better ways to keep updated about blogs with many other tools. Thank you 🙂

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  17. Well, I’m using Google Friend Connect on my blog right now and am not going to remove from sidebar in near future for sure.

    I don’t find it as useless as you probably find it. It does help to form small communities. Probably, it’s meant for small bloggers like us and not for you 😉

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  19. Rightly said. Google friend connect helps in nothing than just boasting that you have x number of followers through google friend connect. I like the term “fan” more than the term “followers”, while I am using none on my blogs. Quality readership is the real need of every blogger and Mohan, you got quality readers.

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    • Thanks Saurabh. Yes, the point i wanted to bring in is that, GFC is not really helping bloggers to connect and explore better traffic.

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  20. Interesting analysis .. I don’t use either though 😛
    Just comfortable posting n hopping arnd .. will bookmark this page for future reference 🙂

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    • You are already a celebrity in your territory :D, you don’t need such widgets for sure with so many fans of your blog (including me ;))

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  21. Well, first of all you need to have Google Friend Connect on your home page and also preferably, in the sidebar which I can’t see right now.

    One more reason you are having trouble with Google Friend Connect is because you have a self-hosted site. Basically, if you observe, all blogspot hosted blogs have this widget in-built so people can easily follow those blogs.. Here in your case, it’s a little tedious, I suppose..

    ..And, anyway, I agree with some of the above comments with the point that Google Friend Connect should not be used to measure traffic. There are other factors like RSS subscribers, e-mail subscribers, visitors from search engines and maybe even Facebook fans to take into consideration…

    Well, that’s it..Sorry for such a long comment..I just wanted to express my views on this topic.. And, by the way, ALL THE BEST!

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    • Parth, it has been there and it exists even now on the home page. I haven’t put it in sidebar for my own reasons. I really fail to understand what makes the self hosted sites go against making an effective use! Irrespective of the host, the product should deliver what it is supposed to! I don’t think people feel any different on blogger as well. Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it 🙂

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  22. I agree with you. Google friend connect isn’t the best way to build traffic…. i use blogspot as a platform and it comes in default with it… and honestly i never gave it much of an importance too… thanks for letting me know about google analytics… would love to try that out…

    latest blog post: The Supreme court of media

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  23. To be honest, your post went over my head though I read it twice Mohan. But its not you. Its me. I don’t use of any of the technologies mentioned. Just login to blogspot & post. I follow blogs like yours because I store the links. Ya ya, I’m technologically illiterate basically .. !!!! 😀

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    • Hey Ro, visit my home page. You will find both the google friend connect and facebook fan page. Those are the two widgets I am talking about in this post wrt the kind of traffic they drive to an individuals blog. Don’t panic, you will know about these over a period of time 😉

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  25. in my cirlce, google friend connect is considered important as its numbers add to your subscriber counts….

    where as twitter or facebook fans are not added to that count on feedburner..

    i was nominated to speak for a blogger conference…the details they wanted from me was subscribers, twitter followers , page rank, stats and technorati authority..

    facebook is easy growth and my blog hit 140 fans in no time….
    i know of a fellow blogger who hit 600 fans in a week! imagine!
    somehow no one has asked me those numbers yet!
    lets see!

    i have not focussed on technorati at all and i have no idea how they calculate authority anymore….i need to work on that..

    do you know..like facebook and goole friend connect..you can show faces of your twitter followers through a widget on your blog.. its called twitter fan..
    i am using it to my new experimental blog…..
    have a look!!!

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    • As far as I look at this, it is only a boast factor to say that I have so many followers! nothing more advantageous than that.. True that facebook and twitter are dominating the blogosphere. I will see how twitter goes on your blog before implementing it on mine 🙂

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