Google Friend Connect & Facebook Connect

Google Friend Connect

A Google, Yahoo!, AIM or OpenID account can easily be used for third party authentication.

You start it off by logging into your Google account and going to http://www.google.com/friendconnect/.

• From there, click on 'Set up a new site' and enter your site name and url.
• You'll be given two files, canvas.html and rpc_relay.html, to copy onto your web site.
• The last step is testing for those two files.

After that, it's a matter of choosing the gadgets you wish to add, customizing it, and then copying the code generated into one of your site pages. The code is normal HTML and Javascript.

From the current gadgets available, you can add on to your site to make it more 'sociable', like knowing the site members, adding in a chat box and reviewing/rating stuff.

You can create your own custom gadgets from these sites:
http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

Facebook Connect

Only a Facebook account can be used for authentication with Facebook Connect.

Login into your Facebook account and follow the instructions located here:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Trying_Out_Facebook_Connect

The main page for developers for Facebook Connect is http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php.

Facebook uses it's own Facebook Markup Language (FBML), in contrast to normal HTML, to facilitate creation of all Facebook applications. Facebook Connect is therefore embedded into user pages using FBML.

Facebook Connect is more of an expansion of Facebook onto other sites, depending on the application, it allows for data on a user site to be displayed back in Facebook.

HOW TO: Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes