Google Friend Connect

This morning, during my first "coffee in the office", I was reading my various RSS feeds and found this item on the Google Blog. Thinking that it sounded kind of interesting I went and had a look and realised that it would be dead simple to implement on my photography pages.

With less than an hour's work (a lot less really, it took longer to set the colours than it did to sort out the code on my site) I had a social networking, rating and commenting system added to my site. The only minor issue that slowed me down a little was the fact that the rate/comment gadget, when set to "per page" scope, doesn't appear to take URL parameters into account when deciding that something is a "page" (in my case this meant that a comment left on one photograph was left on every photograph on my site). Because of that I had to switch to the ID scope system and add a little bit of PHP to generate a unique ID per page.

See here for my main photography membership page and here for an example of a page with the ability to rate and comment.