I Do Not Use Google Friend Connect

Tue, August 24 2010

and here is why:

I have two Google accounts for a necessary reason that I do not wish to outline here. The one that I use the most has no associated Blogger account. I have no reason to create a Blogger account with it. In fact, I left Blogger for a reason (it sucks). Thus, “joining” any sites via Google Friend Connect does me, as a visitor, no damned good. That’s right, there is no way for me to see joined sites. No way for me to use GFC to catch up on your feeds. You don’t show up in my Google Reader.

Sucks to be me, if I do want to remember your blog. I still have to bookmark it or add it to some other service. Kind of defeats the purpose of GFC, doesn’t it?

But let’s think about the implications of this. It means that I am registered as a follower but I am not actually following your blog. But if I’m participating in some sort of giveaway, I’ll keep doing it because what you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you.

Suck to be you because now your numbers don’t really mean as much as you thought they do. And you’re kind of insulting all the non-Blogger users out there, even though I’m pretty sure there are far more non-Blogger users in the grand scheme of the Internet.

It doesn’t just stop there. These numbers are the ones that advertisers and sponsors are using to judge the popularity of your blog. But, wait, didn’t we already establish that these numbers are pretty much useless?

Sucks to be them when they’re not getting as much exposure as they expected.

Of course, you can use an alternative widget. Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog offer options but that sort of negates the purpose of using a service that almost everyone already has an account for.

So what options have you left? You can contact Google and ask if they could hook up us non-Blogger users so that your followed blogs show up in Google Reader. I won’t. I had to contact them when they fucked up my domain when I did have a Blogger account. And it took, like, 2 months for them to do something about it (because I’m pretty sure there was a 2 month queue of other domain owners who had the same problem). I’m not even going to bother.

You could rely on the slightly less accessible Feed Burner statistics to track those who watch your feed. Those numbers are probably more accurate than Friend Connect followers. Google has also acquired that service but, unlike Friend Connect, it seems like it’s still functional.

As a WordPress User, I use an awesome feed statistic plugin to track my followers (yay for internal service!). Domain owners have a plethora of statistic and server report tools available to them including AW Stats or Webalizer. None of those require a hideous gadget on your website, either.

Any if you’re an advertiser or sponsor you should probably be looking at Google’s PageRank for the website or the Alexa ranking instead of the number of GFC followers. Neither of those are a popularity contest and they both rely on actual data about the website, its visitors and links–y’know the things that actually exist and mean something.

The fact is, Friend Connect is a pretty good idea but Google has royally fucked up the implementation and we all should be smart enough not to use it until Google does something about that.