Some of you may have noticed by now those two blue rimmed gadgets in my sidebar labeled Google Friend Connect and The Thinkin’ Wall. This is a new experiment in learning to be more social this year than I have been in the past however, to avoid any confusion I thought a bit of an explanation about what Google Friend Connect and these two gadgets actually are. Or rather what they are not to be more precise and on that note…

There seem to be more and more folks these days with Facebook accounts happily throwing meat pies, chickens and snowballs at one another, poking everyone on their “Friends” list and sending  virtual hugs, sunshine, beer and what-nots all around. An unbelievably complicated, merry mess if I ever saw one.

Google Friend Connect isn’t that.

And then there’s Twitter where everyone is following everyone else around to the point that where no matter where one turns there’s someone else not far behind. Every person, business, research project, software company and John Cleese have Twitter accounts.

There’s 3,267 Twitter related applications and gadgets for your downloading pleasure if you want to Tweet from the comfort of your desktop or blog or cell phone or PDA or iPhone/Android/what-have-you. If you lean toward schizophrenia you can even follow yourself by what I understand.

Google Friend Connect isn’t that either.

In fact, Google Friend Connect isn’t even close to any of current  social networks out there today. What it is, is a way to add your own little social network thing-a-ma-bob to your site—that’s it.

For the reader it’s not another social network to join where you follow, throw, poke, draw, scribble, dribble or anything else for that matter. And the majority of visitors to a given site already have an existing account they can log into the membership gadget with, they just don’t know it yet.

It works like this.

When you join via the Membership Gadget (the top widget on my sidebar) you’re joining the actual site you’re visiting (mine—in this case), not some huge social network and like I said, you probably already have the username and password you need:

Yup, that’s it. Your login is should already be established so there’s actually nothing else to join with the possible exception of this site and the ability to have your face or avatar of your choosing proudly showing in my particular membership gadget as

It’s a rather new thing and limited in scope at the moment but if you would care to try out my little gadget and start a conversation or two someplace besides the comment area of the various posts, I wouldn’t mind a bit. My sidebar’s a little small in width at the moment but I intend to work on that part of it in the near future. More space for your face and all that.