Social media is evolving quickly these days. Self-contained blogs are becoming a thing of the past. Social sites are cross-pollinating, and Google is not about to fall behind. In the spirit of Disqus comes Google Friend Connect, a suite of tools for bloggers and site owners to incorporate Google-based social apps with their otherwise standalone sites, like this WordPress blog that I mostly neglect.
I use Disqus on my Tumblr site; Tumblr doesn’t include commenting on its own and adding Disqus is as simple as pasting in some code to the Tumblr customization widget. Google Friend Connect provides comments (seen here in lieu of the Wordpress commenting system) but requires a couple html pages added to the root of the site — not something one can easily do on Tumblr though Google’s own Blogger can use GFC.
I note that commenters can authenticate via Google or OpenID authentication, among a couple others. That’s handy.