I’m working on a personal project at the moment, and wanted to have a social networking component. I looked at the open source social networking packages as well as some CMS distros with social networking bolt-ons. They all had one thing in common – they sucked.

Eventually, I gave up and decided to code the thing myself. The main application is coded using the Zend framework. This allowed me to set up a maintainable MVC app, and use some of the built in services to easily leverage data sources from web services. In essence, the site populates itself from various data feeds on the internet.

I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel for the social networking aspect, so I looked at technologies like Open Social. Eventually, I came across Google’s Friend Connect Service.

It is a matter of a few minutes work to integrate the technology into a website and add widgets. Any new user coming along can view widgets but needs to log in to add comments, etc. If you have a Gmail, Yahoo, AIM or Open ID account you can join up right away.

At the moment the technology is limited in a couple of ways:

• There are only a few premade widgets, including a comment wall (with youtube video linking), a music widget, a daft game and a few more bits.
• Some widgets can’t be customised to match your site
• Currently, there doesn’t seem to be an API to interact with existing widgets or code your own.

These caveats aside, the technology looks promising. Here’s hoping that Google will continue to develop it.