Introducing Google Friend Connect API – 15 Tutorials/Resources and AJAX Playground Examples!

electBlake — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:13:41 +0000

Google + OAuth + OpenID = Google Friend Connect.

They’ve done it again, the boys over at google has released a full javascript API for their Friend Connect services. Which uses services like OAuth and OpenID to authenticate users on your website, and then provide all of the social networking features they want!

taken from official homepage:
“Google Friend Connect lets site owners instantly awaken and strengthen the community that visits their web site. Friend Connect:

Makes it easy for every site owner to add Friend Connect to their site regardless of their technical capabilities.

Uses open standards to let visitors control their own data and freely share it with sites and services as they see fit. Services include OpenID providers like Yahoo, social network providers like Twitter, and update aggregators like Plaxo Pulse.

Friend Connect APIs enable developers to:

Integrate social flows and data directly within a page’s markup, via the OpenSocial standard specification.

Integrate existing login systems, registered users, and existing data with new social data and activities.

Create social gadgets & services that are embeddable within millions of Friend Connect enabled sites.”

The factsheet, code examples, tutorials, and more after the turn!

Google Friend Connect API Factsheet

Technologies Used: OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial
API Homepage: http://code.google.com/apis/friendconnect/
API Authorization: FriendConnect Standard Signup – http://www.google.com/friendconnect/
Deployments: Javscript, Serverside with OpenSocial (which supports PHP, Python Java, Ruby, for a Start) – Links Found Below
API Documentation: http://code.google.com/apis/friendconnect/js_api.html#gfc-api

Google’s first foray into social networking with their network “Orkut.com” has had mixed reviews. With ups and downs over the years its never been a SMASHING global breakthrough (thats probably because its isolated to one country, heh)

With Friend Connect going API, Google seems to be creating a decentralized social network, using the entire internet as your homepage instead of on tiny and annoying mini-feed on your profile.

Imagine a world where 85% of the sites had Friend Connect on their site, you’d never have to register on a site again, simply type in your google creds and you’d be off to the races. I myself am a little scared of this, in recent years I’ve moved away from the google train – fearing what they will do with my personal information. I’ve been searching for a truly neutral (and yes, trendy) OpenID service that simply provides everything I need w/out tapping into my information.

Google has had many ghost stories over the years – Google Analytics results affecting Adsense Revenues, or Search Engine Optimzation. Even in my gmail I fear that google will figure out I’m Canadian and change my profile to match accordingly.

So with great power, comes great resposibility. And I know I am not going to jump full blown unto the Friend Connect train. I imagine myself registering a simple jailed user on there, to utilize the features, but I am uncomfortable putting my entire life into google’s hands…

Be sure to checkout the original news post at our friendly programmableweb.com

Google Friend Connect API Plugins, and CMS Related Talk

Google Code Project Page for Wordpress, Drupal, phpBB – The initial releases for the 3 plugins that can be dropped in to work with google friend connect’s api.
Direct links to
Joomla Component for Making Google Friend Connect Code Insertion Easier! – Jumi
Joomla Component for Google Friends Rate and Review – Google Friend Connect Rate/Review gadget allows your visitors / viewers to rate a page, or a section of a page and give comments. Viewers can use this to rate videos, articles, books, photos, songs, or anything else you can imagine. You can put multiple Review/Rate gadgets on one page or one for each item you want viewers to review.

Google Friend Connect Examples

Official Google Friend Connect Examples – Simple examples for GFC Login, form generation, server-side integration, and an example site!
Google Friend Connect Live Examples via Google’s Ajax Playground - Google Friend Connect has been added to the powerful Google AJAX Playground so you can test out many great examples for Fetching Persons, Sign-in/Sign-out, Adding Member Info and more!
Friend Connect Example Integration – A well made site using the google friend API to show the seemless integration into a website at ossamples.com
Friend Connect Website for Bible Study – a great site showing the power of Google’s Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect API Tutorials:

Google Friend Connect Server-side Tutorial – a well crafted little tutorial on how to integrate Google Friend Connect via server-side (I’ve included many links to API wrappers for OpenSocial below, you’ll need one of them)
How to Integrate Friend Connect Outside of iFrames – a little tutorial, which may give some insight into the application but I do believe that integrating Friend Connect Outside of an iFrame is a little trivial now as Google Friend Connect has evolved past a simple cut/paste snippet. This is still useful for some background into how the technology works and how its’s progressed.
How to Grab User Info with OpenSocial - a tutorial I randomly stumbled upon that seems to be an opensocial tutorial but seeing as GFC is so closely related might be useful, Looks like he originally did this for a flash application – cool.
How to Integrate Google Friend Connect – a detailed approach at the security and background behind integrating GFC into your site. Not for the feint of heart but will give you real pros out there a run for your money with the ideas and discussion he presents @ unclescript.blogspot.com
Non-API Integration of Google Friend Connect into your Site with Gadgets! – It has links to a Wall Gadget, Rate/Review Gadget, and an Add Members Gadget @ blog.thinkdiff.net/?p=430

OpenSocial Wrappers and Libraries for Google Friend Connect (GFC) Serverside

OpenSocial API Wrapper for PHP – for use with Google Friend Connect server-side
OpenSocial API Wrapper for Java – for use with Google Friend Connect server-side (or in your Java Applications?)
OpenSocial API Wrapper for Python – for use with Google Friend Connect server-side
OpenSocial API Wrapper for Objective C (Aka OpenSocial API Wrapper for iPhone) – for use with Google Friend Connect via server-side (or your iPhone Apps??!)
OpenSocial API Wrapper for Ruby (aka OpenSocial Ruby Gem) – for use with Google Friend Connect via server-side ruby

If you have any specific requests or topics you’d like me to cover let me know! I’m looking for components and libraries for CodeIgniter and CakePHP now, but.. seems like people from those camps are opting to use their own ACL’s for social aspects.

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Introducing SelectorGadget – Dapper Style DOM Selection for JQuery, Javascript, and beyond

electBlake — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:57 +0000

+ = ?

I caught a jquery tweet today that linked me to an interesting little helper bookmarklet called “SelectorGadget”.

“SelectorGadget is an open source bookmarklet that makes CSS selector generation and discovery on complicated sites a breeze.”

SelectorGadget, is a very easy to use bookmarklet that can be used on any website of your choosing (Although someone in the comments DID have a problem with scraping a site that is NTFW )

To get started with SelectorGadget, head over to their humble website, and install the bookmarklet and watch the video. Anyone with experience in Data Extraction (Hpricot or Beautiful Soup – as the website suggests), will immedately see the benefits of this little application.

With apparent support from JQuery, and its open-source repository over at github, I think SelectorGadget will be able to spawn alot of interest within the various Javascript and DOM Selection/Extraction camp’s around the internet.

Some ideas for you guys to dig your teeth into after the fold.

My Forseeable Uses for SelectorGadget and its Algorythms:

Speed up creation of GreaseMonkey userscripts(.org) for those of us who rely on JQuery for our javascript prowess.
Make DOM Selection in your own Javascript Applications (jquery included), MUCH MUCH easier
Dynamic JQuery plugins for data extraction – Make more versitile plugins to manage dynamic datasets.
- For Example:
  - Creation a plugin that adds dom to specific element types of a page (mp3 player to mp3 links)
  - Generalize the selection of the mp3 links
  - Drop in mp3 player plugin to any page w/out any need to initilize
Creation of your own Dapper Engine????????
- For instance if you could (hypothetically) get jaxer running this javascript selection engine. Then maybe… you could be running a serverside DOM Selector engine with native ajax-scraping abilities…Hrrmm…
Quick Ruby Data Extraction & Screen Scraping
- Hpricot, or better yet scrubyt, OR even better still skimr (the re-factored scrubyt for those of you who have been paying attention)
SelectorGadget to phpQuery ? – phpQuery is a dom selector engine for php designed to be a port of JQuery to php. Its pretty good but a little slow for my liking.

The Death of PHP in Data Extraction

Yes, I am calling it. This is not breaking news as Ruby’s scrubyt (and its driving forces WWW:Mechanize and Hpricot), have been dominating the “custom api creation” process for awhile now. Still, php is so common and easy to get up and running its hard for me drop it all together.

Software like SelectorGadget gives me even more reason to move away from php and work on my Ruby development more. As an interim solution (in the interest of time) I imagine myself using Ruby for my data and php for my presentation.

OR, if I can finally get a solid native jaxer server running I could simply use my javascript skills to properly deploy my data extraction javascript applications. (If your a jaxer master, please message me, I’ve tried numerous times with limited success)

Until I am a ruby master (which might take time as I’m learning far too many languages atm), I am going to see what I can hack out of the SelectorGadget engine. Its algorithms might unlock a very cool selector engine for php (aka an improved or refactored phpQuery )

Anyway, I think SelectorGadget has ALOT of promise and I see this accomplishment echoing through a lot of different technologies and software. I know I am going to dig into it and see what I can do. I’ll be sure to report all of my findings to you good people.

Happy api’ing.