Google – Social Web Blog: Introducing the ClackPoint gadget
[Google Friend Connect users ....] Now that you’ve added Google Friend Connect to your site and are using some of the great gadgets to develop your community, have you wanted more direct communication with and between community members? Well, ClackPoint gives you exactly this by mixing text chat, conference calling and a dash of document sharing, and presenting it as a gadget for Friend Connect.
The ClackPoint gadget doesn’t just let your users chat live in a text-based chat room, it also lets them dial in and talk either directly from their computer or, if they prefer, by phone. Status icons in the gadget mean that users can see who is dialed in and who is talking, and can poke or mute themselves or each other.
In addition to supporting live text and audio chat, ClackPoint also provides collaboration features, including a shared notepad allowing multiple users to edit simultaneously, and slide sharing for those times when your community needs to present and discuss written information.
We think that integrating online collaboration with Friend Connect makes a lot of sense. Friend Connect is already a great way to extend a website with social features to build a community, and the heart of any community is how it communicates and interacts with itself and others. Bringing live text, voice and document sharing into a website keeps users on that site and strengthens the community built around it.
Developing a gadget for Friend Connect was a great experience. Friend Connect’s use of OpenSocial meant we could target multiple social networks with one code base, greatly accelerating our development.
Wow, this is awesome!
Posted via web from susanbeebe’s posterous
