As you may know today Google released Friend Connect. I decided to give it a try. It took about 20 minutes to set up my blog with 4 gadgets: Members, Sign In, Rate/Review, and Wall/Comments. It took about 30 minutes to separate the skin from all these widgets, and set up the Canvas so users can see gadgets in a separate window, if they want to.

Google Friend Connect doesn’t have any server-side components on user’s server — everything is handled by Google. All you have to do is to deploy 2 (two) static HTML files, and add various snippets that can be customized and generated on the Friend Connect’s web site. The resulting snippets are simple, and can be easily understood and restructured.

Now armed with new gadgets I decided to add comments hoping that Google will do the better job of spam filtering than mine implementation. Go ahead and try new features. Sign in (several methods are supported including OpenID!), join my site, rate and comment posts. For now I decided to turn on the moderation of posts to prevent spam and vandals, just in case Google will fail. And remember that it is still the beta, so any problem can happen.

If for some reasons I and Google screwed up the site rendering and it unusable for you, throw me an email. You can find my address on every page of this web site and in the author’s information page.