Tech News Beats

Recently Adsense announced that now publishers located in HongKong and Hungary can receive their earning from adsense ads via Electronic Funds Transfer(EFT). In all of the countries eligible to receive EFT, HongKong is the second Asian entity after Japan. If one have quick look on the list of countries where Adsense EFT is available, you can see most of them are European, North American, Australia, New Zealand etc. Only two Asian entities feature in that list viz. Japan and HongKong. Israel is the only country in the middle east to have this facility. To avail EFT one just need to enter their bank details in their Adsense account, billing info section. I am not sure why some services which can benefit both the parties immensely are not extended to all the countries. Let us try to see a few reasons why EFT has not been extended to other Asian countries like India and African countries. Security could be one of the reasons which could have tied Google’s hand. In case electronic transfers, if there is some fradulent activity there is no chance to re-check or take remedial action once the transfer takes place. While such kind of online scams are quite common in African countries, but that may not be the case in India. Cyber laws in India has been revamped recently.

EFT should be made available in as many as countries possible definitely keeping in mind the security aspect. It helps the publishers to get their earnings instantly without waiting for the check to reach and at the same time it saves Adsense money. So it is mutually beneficial to both. So when EFT is becoming available in India?

Google Friend Connect is a social network application wherein one can just copy and paste snippets of code into a site, and Google Friend Connect will show comments from various other social network websites like MySpace, Facebook etc

In Google’s own words, “Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social. But the barriers to offering social applications on the site have been considerable. Google Friend Connect changes this by enabling any site to offer dozens of social gadgets created by Google and OpenSocial developers to their visitors. This means more visitors spending more time on a more engaging website — with absolutely no programming required to make it happen. As a site owner, Friend Connect provides you the ability to add social features to your site, without writing code.

Visitors no longer need to create a new account or develop yet another friends list just to use the social applications on your site. We create the infrastructure that allows one login to be used across multiple sites and the ability to reuse existing friend relationships that the visitor has already established elsewhere.”

So we may safely say that Google Friend Connect is an interface which helps to connect your websites to other social networking sites seamlessly like Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, FaceBook, Linkedin etc. It collects data from big social networking websites as they make it available and display on third party sites like yours and mine in a seamless uniform way. Since it will be using your network of friends, Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. Which is a great thing for any site owner but more than that what it can really do is help brand a site among a particular network of friends. The big players in this space has already announced their version in this space. MySpace came up with Data Availability and Facebook with their version called Facebook Connect.

Google Friend Connect will be working with existing standards such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial.
Also, it will access data APIs from MySpace, Google, Facebook and if any other website comes along. There is one flip side to Friend Connect, people using it will not be able to add their own data to it to create various applications. The code snippets are supposed to come confined in an iframe. So thereby Google keeping a sort of control on it. As of now the Friend Connect is in preview release and is available to only a few partner sites. However, if you are interested in participating to review it, you may sign-up with them. If you are approved, you will be notified as a partner.

Check a few example sites:

http://www.myfirstearthquake.com/

http://www.mylatestpiece.com/