Lately I have been getting a flood of Gchat requests. I am starting to theorize that this is the new Google Friend Connect mutual friends request. I mean allot….

Google is huge on testing, so before they release documentation, they will test it to death. Better than what Digg and Facebook has been doing lately, rushing apps to production and then paying the price when they backfire.

So we will be testing this and have some live video on what I believe is the new version of this. Oddly enough it has just started just a Google Wave was released to dev guys.

It would make sense for the Add Friend feature to pull contact info into gmail automatically. It would make my life easier too. Perhaps setting it as an option would help Google combat privacy concerns, but seems that would sort of defeat some of the purpose of GFC (making connecting easier).

If Google Wave is going to be a central spot for our social media, then the Add Friend feature needs to have a purpose and automatically pulling in contact info would be awesome. The main criticism against every new social site is we have to yet again fill in more profile info and re-connect with people. If we could get set up on GFC and also use it as a way to find our friends elsewhere then it has huge potential to take off and streamline everyone’s digital social lives.

Thanks again for giving us updates. If anything changes from your perspective, let us know.

So, to all of you who have pointed out that you are not getting any either, I say thanks so I could look deeper into this.

The features come and go, and there is no documentation that this truly occurs, only my track record on seeing this in the last year.

Of course this is the one thing that I did not screen capture so it figures. I will get some exact data on this soon, but for now all I can say is that is has come and gone many times since May 12th, 2008. We shall see….

Remember that this is only a six month old beta release. If I am wrong in any way and have exact data I will be the first one to let you all know.

I am not afraid of being wrong, I am afraid of seeming to mislead anyone. I would rather be proved wrong on this than send anyone down a road that hurts their business in any way.

Also think about this: Hundreds of new developers from the Google I/O conference are hitting the brand new APIs of Google Wave and the heretofore unused dev servers.

Google will lock down features that we have seen and expect when new code is being brought to release level. I feel they do this so that if there is some big code endless loop error, everyone’s privacy is protected.

Think of what would happen if some new code caused an endless loop that made us all GFC mutual friends and all of a sudden everybody got the others Gmail address in their contacts. We are talking at least on million users.

Would anyone ever trust Google again? Plus Google Wave is directly connected to our friends lists and relationships in GFC. This feature could be shut down until a Google Wave first release comes out.

I do let people know that they can send me an email, Gchat request or Google Latitude request and that will definitely make us mutual friends and that has been public and known for the last year. Just obfuscate your email link chrislang a t Gmial * con and so far spammers are not running bots that go that deep into text strings. Besides Google knows spam and knows how to beat it.

Hope this all helps you feel more confident in GFC and the information that is going around. I don’t worry about friends lists that highly, but everyone seems concerned so this is an attempt to set any record straight.

BigChief SEOless of the Whitehat clan:

Chris Lang

Funny, when I added it I had no idea that it would really have an impact but after reading your post and the comments I can see I need to start utilizing and learning more. You always have great info to share. Thank you again!! Let me know if you are still not able to see the GFC widget.

In the mean time I agree with you. In fact I did a piece about it two weeks ago, because yes, at times this feature does not work. We have all heard this before. Here’s why…..

http://www.googlingsocial.com/?p=285

Lot’s of documentation there, but like I said, none of us work for Google, so all we can do is observe and report.

Truly yours,

Chris Lang

Chris Lang is making allot of noise about GFC being tied into GMail and this is currently NOT the case.

If you become a friend through Friend Connect they are NOT added to your GMail contacts.

There is more but that’s the biggest misconception that’s floating around at the moment.

I’m @notinbed on Twitter if you’d like to know more.