I tried to sign up for Google’s new Friend Connect this morning but encountered an error or “something bad” as Google calls it. Here is a screen capture of the error I received and below that is the sign-up page.

I’d like to hear if you have tried signing up for Google’s Friend Connect and if you were able to do it with success or if you received an error like I did….. or at least……something bad….

———UPDATE———

I tried signing up again for Friend Connect with successful form submit. Google is now looking for more site information upon site submission including info such as:

• Full name:
• Email address:
• Type of interest:
• URL of my site (for site owners):
• Site Description
• Additional information: Any info regarding your intended use of this service is appreciated!
• Page Views Per Day
• Unique Users
• How Would Your Site Use Friend Connect Please be as descriptive as possible

I haven’t had this site real active so don’t have much for stats but I am really interested to see how I can use Friend Connect in my current projects launch this summer. I wonder if they are interested in small potatoes and will let me in to this beta preview release.

Tonight I saw the post over at TechCrunch writing about the upcoming relaunch of Yahoo Buzz and how it was morphing into a DIGG style voting of news items. TechCrunch gave us the heads up that the new Yahoo Buzz beta is only open to Yahoo employees at this point but that posters have been up around the Yahoo offices plugging the site’s arrival on this coming Monday, February 25th at 9:00 pm.

Though the TechCrunch article stated the url on the posters alpha.buzz.yahoo.com was protected I had to go check it out for myself, if nothing else but see what was up with the old Yahoo buzz. At first arrival at the alpha site I came across the password protected stuff, so no go there, I decided to do a Google site search to see if Google happened to find a hidden page or even a cached bit for us. Bingo! Google had a page for us and the page was not protected. Here are a couple screenshots I grabbed, this one and one at the bottom of this post along with bullet points for the publishers wishing to get their content in front of the voters on Yahoo Buzz and even the main Yahoo home page.

The new Alpha Yahoo Buzz People catagory page is still open so go see it for yourself. I was even able to log in with my regular Yahoo account and vote for the story at the top of the page. You can see in my screen grab where it says “Thanks for voting! and the “buzzed!” count right above the orange thanks for voting message. I still wanted to find out more about this new Yahoo Buzz thing and I found one other link that was not protected. That page I found is the Yahoo Buzz Publisher page and it’s not even in the alpha sub-domain. This tells us more about the new Yahoo Buzz social news site including the following:

• Buzz gets your content on the Yahoo! network.
• Buzz features the most interesting stories and videos on the Web
• Content is ranked based on votes, search-term popularity, and what everyone is reading and emailing - right this instant
• Buzz drives traffic directly to your site to read the full story
• Users can vote for your content from your site or on Buzz itself
• Top Buzz content may be featured on the Yahoo! homepage
• mebeliStay tuned for upcoming syndication tools, including APIs and customized modules…
• Partner with Buzz: We’ll be accepting new publishers soon. Join our mailing list for updates.

Looks like we will have another social venue to contribute to very soon with Yahoo Buzz. Will Yahoo Buzz battle DIGG, Propeller, MIXX for big time social traffic? Yahoo has a big community already, only time will tell if they can get those folks to get active with the socializing of news. What are your thoughts?

One pet peeve I have had with Sphinn is checking the submits by sphinner. Many times I feel like I am missing good items that friends submit because, well lets face it, you can’t be sphinning around the clock and see them all come through What’s New. In order to check submits by sphinner now on Sphinn you have to locate the sphinner most likely through the network page where you may have to search or page for the sphinner if they are not a top sphinner on the first page.

Once you have found your sphinner it takes 2 clicks to get to their submit page. Moving from one friend’s sumbits page to the next friend’s submit page will take you at least 4 clicks(2 back to the network page, 1 on the next sphinner name to info tab and 1 more on the submit tab), that’s if you are lucky enough to have your next friend on the same network page as the previous one. This takes too long if you want to follow multiple friends and pay them the respect of looking at their submits which is how a friend might like to treat another friend.

I finally got tired of all this clicking and figured “Hey, I could use simple bookmarks in my Firefox browser to check sphinner submit pages.” And what do you know, it works like a charm! It takes me one combo click to open my bookmarks and have a big list of Sphinn friends right there on the screen next to my open Sphinn page. Then I can go down the list with 1 click per friend to see their submits. Simple, short and sweet! It saves a bunch of time and I don’t miss what those that I want to follow are sphinning. If you are wondering, it only took 10 or 15 minutes to get a nice size list of folks added to my list.

One concern with this method is you may get out of the habit of seeing the new faces and submits by folks you don’t have bookmarked. Because of this I made sure to put a bookmark for the What’s New page right at the top of my list and always check it when I check other friends. When I notice a new sphinner doing a lot of good stuff I can simply add them to my list. I also put the hot front page in my bookmarks, but I’m not sure why. The front page is probably the page I visit the least because I have seen most all of these stories already. The What’s New page is where the action is HOT!