YouTube is now asking YouTube members to associate their channels (profiles) with Google profiles as of the last few days.

Google is taking YouTube, Google Reader, Google Buzz, Friend Connect, Docs, Latitude, Wave, Blogger, Picasa, Gmail, Gcaht, SMS messaging sent directly to your friends phones, and bringing them altogether as a very robust social network, and has been for some time.

This is one more step in Google solidifying it’s social network of sites all based on your Google friends list AKA your Google contacts.

Google will now begin integrating YouTube friends into G contacts as the big G’s network is based on your friends list.

YouTube has been showing add a friend links for some time now.

But did you know that was the Google Friend Connect engine running behind the scenes?

Now these same YouTube friends will now be your Google Buzz followers and your Google Friend Connect Friends.

If you have been sitting on the fence, waiting to see if this Google thing is going to pan out, it’s time to get off that fence post and get going before your competition does.

Right now, you can get everything I know about YouTube.

150 pages, 5 videos.

I can guarantee you it is unlike any other YT system out there, I invented this stuff, I did not borrow it from someone else and retread it like so many others. (you know who I mean)

100 pages more on how you can drive traffic thru Google Friend Connect.

Did you know you can now mass email all your Google Friend Connect followers thru the gadget?

Then we teach you how to turn you Google Buzz feed into a hot topic discussion platform that turns social followers into email opt ins.

(yes, social followers are easily converted into email subscribers, you just have to know how)

BUT WAIT – You also get a free bonus 15 minute consult with me each and every week. This is a $2400 real world value that cannot be purchased anywhere else.

You get over 350 pages that have taken me 2 years to compile today.

Then you get 4 more chapters each month detailing how to build your Google social network following.

AND your information never goes out of date like some ebook, because it is all contained in a members only site and constantly updated by me, Chris Lang and my staff.

Imagine if you had this kind of email in your inbox back when Twitter was launched.

Or Facebook? Good God, you would own the place by now.

Click this link below, get off the fence or watch your competition kick your butt with what you could have learned today.

Click here to dominate Google’s NEW Social Network

Got questions? I got answers, ask away in the comments below.

Chris Lang
480 634 0597

You can see in the beginning of this Google Friend Connect video, how Larry Brauner was having lots of problems using the HTML widget in WordPress. Do Not use the widget system in WordPress if you can avoid it. Here’s how to easily add these gadgets to WordPress code directly.

It’s easy, just watch this short video….. (Best in HD, click full screen)

Also if you are using an older version of WordPress your Google Friend Connect may not work. Use this fix by adding the code Google supplied me with just above the Google Friend Connect gadget code.

However since I upgraded my WordPress version to 2.9 I am having no problems with Google Friend Connect now.

Android Pros

The new Androids are head and tails above the first Android G1. Don’t judge Androids by a first generation model you may have used previously or someone you know has.

Tethering, Wifi hotspot, Android delivers first, very valuable especially in hotel stays and Robert describes how his Droid saved him the $15 a day fee at a hotel recently.

Multitasking rocks, Scoble talks about how multitasking makes the Android a computer, where as an iPhone is a still a one app at a time phone. Hence better battery life, it’s a trade off.

Google Voice is much better on Androids.

Android EVO screen size allows you to read documents much more easily. He said he can see reading a book on this and oddly enough Kindle for Android’s is due to be released this month by Amazon.

Google Maps is dramatically better on Android, turn by turn navigation on Android is very valuable, much much better than on iPhones.

Google Buzz and Latitude built into Google Maps, geo location features, all work much better on Androids.

AT&T is the Achilles heel of the iPhone. Numerous dead zones in the San Francisco area.

AT&T has now removed their unlimited data plans. You are grandfathered in at AT&T if you already have an unlimited data plan. Otherwise it’s $10 a GB. But if you want to tether the iPhone to use it as a portable WiFi hotspot you will lose your grandfathered unlimited plan and must pay the $10 per GB fees.

To activate an iPhone you have to activate thru iTunes. To get your backed up contacts from your previous iPhone, you have to reinstall them form iTunes. (I hate iTunes, won’t have it on my machines)

On an Android all you have to do is put in your Email address and Google password. When Scoble did this all his contacts showed up, all his apps showed up, all his calendar items showed up. It was all there in seconds with out having to use iTunes. This amazed me and it even amazed Robert Scoble.

Android Cons

Apple has already wrapped up the most viable users by getting to the market 2 years ahead of Google Androids. In other words, the peeps with the money already spent it with Apple. They already have purchased lots of iPhone apps and are pretty committed to their iPhone.

Battery life is better in iPhones, dramatically better as Scoble points out numerous times.

Solution: By a second battery and carry a charger and a car charger. Something I have already done.

Robert does point out the the microphone and sound quality of calls is better on the iPhone. I have noticed this myself, voice quality is somewhat less on my Droid.

The bottom line

Advantage: Google Android.

I currently pay $110 a month for unlimited everything thru Verizon on my Motorola Droid. The pricing plan AT&T just rolled out today really sucks.

Scoble describes meeting a normal guy in Tahoe that bought an Android even though he felt the iPhone may be a better device just because he hates AT&T so much. You also have the choice of Tmobile, Sprint or Verizon as your carrier.

Scoble said the only thing he does not like about the Android is the battery life.

He even goes so far to say that the he is not tempted to turn the iPhone back on, and he is a Apple fanboy.

As iPhone fanboy an you are going to meet natural resistance when you change to a new UI, like Android. Take this into consideration when you hear iPhone fans trash Google Androids.

It is also important to note, that this is Robert Scoble’s words, not mine, the number one Google fanboy.

Take the time to watch the video and get this right from the source. I have followed Scoble for years now and his take on this is very important as Robert Scoble is a huge influencer when it comes to anything tech. This video alone will sell many thousands of Androids.

In the end, it is the Android that will make or break Google social networking features. When you are able to reference your contacts, calendar, YouTube, Google Buzz and Google Wave networks right from your phone and sync them without having to sync to your main computer you can really see the advantage of Gwave Mastery.

Why should you read this now?

• Find out if Google privacy problems are real
• New Google Buzz buttons, get them inside
• Discover how to set Buzz up right
• Make money, build relationships and craft content for Buzz

When you read my free The State of Google Buzz Authority Report you will understand why this has occurred, why it had to be and how Google Buzz is moving forward fast.

The document is a PDF file. Right click the link, select “Save link as” and then save it to your desktop.

If I have any questions or comments I welcome them below and look forward to our discussion.

Here’s what a Tweet looks like on Google Maps when you show your Twitter location.

Click image to see full size.

Enabling your Twitter location in Google Maps goes like this.

Step #1, opt in

Click image to see full size.

Click “Turn on location”

Click image to see full size.

In FireFox click the “Share location” button

I suggest not to check the “Rember for this site” button so you can choose to share your location for each online session rather than every time you Tweet.

Click image to see full size.

Now you will see where Your IP address finds you to be located

Click image to see full size.

Now on your Tweet you see the location link

Click image to see full size.

Clicking the Google logo will take you into Google maps to the area from where you Tweeted

Click image to see full size.

Here Ben Parsons of Mashable’s screen shot from his phone

Notice that Google Latitude is enabled on his phone, or so it looks. This may also be another application too, but it looks very much like Latitude to me.

Click image to see full size.

Discuss this on Buzz with me and your Buzz friends

Join us on Buzz and tell us what YOU think….

You can see this in action on my Chris Lang Twitter page

And you can see where Mashable and TechCrunch broke this story (yawn) but why bother, this set of screen shots tells you way more LOL!

I did not like how the code worked so I improved upon it here. I did not like the fact the image resided on John’s site and it was hard to understand that you needed to add it to WordPress code. Better instructions were needed. Here you go!

Here is how to do this….

Here is the code:

<!-- Begin Buzz Button --><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN-HERE/<?php the_ID(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>“><img src="/images/buzz.png" alt="Buzz This" /></a><!-- End Buzz Button -->

Right click the textbox, select all and then copy the code.

Next open Notepad if you are in Windows, your text editor if you are in Linux or Mac. And I mean text editor, not Word or the equivalent. Notepad is the default in Windows, or you can use your HTML editor set on HTML not WYSIWYG.

Now paste the code you just copied and replace YOUR-DOMAIN-HERE with your domain.

If you use numeric strings on your blog URLs like I do, (look at your address bar) then you will need to add ?p= after the / after your domain. link this http://www.googlingsocial.com/?p= as I had to do. If you use word string ULSs in your blog posts you should be fine.

Now copy the code again and proceed with the next step.

Step 2 Add the code to WordPress

Next go to your WordPress admin panel.

Click “Appearance” or “Design” tab in older installs.

Now click “Design Editor” to open the WordPress app.

Next open the “Single Post” page, usually named single.php as the file name. You only want it on your single blog post pages, you do not want your Buzz friends adding the entire domain based 10 post blog synopsis to Buzz.

Look at the image below to see where you are going to add the code.

You are looking for a line that says ?php the_content()

Like I did in the screen shot below.

Click image to see full size.

Paste in your code directly below it. I supplied you with comment tags so you can find only your code easily after you add it.

Click “Save” to finish this step.

Step 3: Get the Button image

Right click the image, select save as and then save it to the images folder of your site.

Now FTP the image to the /images folder on your site. Almost every site has one, it is the default. If not create one. If you don’t know how to FTP I show your here. Don’t pay attention to the Google Friend Connect stuff, they removed the need to FTP.

Hope this helps you out and you can try my button out below. Any ideas or feedback on how we can improve this just let me know in the comments below.

UPDATE: 9:02 AZ time Armand’s support team got right back to me just now and has enabled comments on his blog :]

Armand you made some valid points but I have to correct few. I know you are in Australia too so who knows what version of Buzz you are getting out of Google data centers down under. So, Armand, you said:

Armand: Allow People to Buzz From Their Profile Page. Right now you can only comment.

You have a “What are you doing” type box right at the top of Buzz. You can post links, pictures and text AND you can post them as public or private.

Click image to see full size.

Google is changing Buzz every day, features come and go, just stay with it, it will settle down.

Armand: Create a “Follow My Buzz” Button so people can add it to their websites

You might notice I have a “Follow Me On Buzz” button to the right of this post….

The button is on your Google profile. You may have missed this because you have be to logged into a Google account that is not yours to see it.

A follow on Buzz button in that case can be a link to the profile of your choice.

Armand: Outbound communication with Twitter and Facebook at a minimum.

I believe comments only go back to a Twitter profile if you respond with the @ sign but I have not tested this yet.

There is no communication with Facebook. The only Facebook aggregation you get is from FriendFeed.

Facebook decided on this policy, not Google. Facebook decided to go it alone with Microsoft’s support when they took Microsoft’s $220 million investment in 2008 and decided to bar Google Friend Connect from Facebook.

Armand: Allow Custom Profile Pages

http://www.google.com/profiles/chrislang

That is about as custom as you get. Or maybe I misunderstood what you are calling a profile page.

If you want to find your Google profile page the link is http://www.google.com/profiles/me and if you have not created one Google will ask you to do so.

Armand: Make a “Followers” image list. Like Twitter has on right hand side.

Right there in Buzz, just look for the link “Followers” at the top of Buzz. It will open an overlay with your Followers and you can follow in return from the as well. Or remove pesky unwanted followers too.

Click image to see full size.

Armand: Allow you to make your whole Buzz Account PRIVATE. Twitter does this and so does even MySpace.

Good point. Bet they are working on that now. Google has been very receptive to suggestions so far. There should be a better setting page for Buzz.

Armand: Create separate buzz page for users as well. This will make it easier to use even if you are NOT in Gmail.

You can do that Armand, here is the Buzz page for this post…. You can easily post Buzz comments right there too.

No, Gmail is the key to this thing. That is one reason Google Wave is not used as highly as I predicted, no Gmail integration.

The idea is that Gmail is your communications platform. With Gchat, Gmail and now a social dashboard all in Gmail it is “One Stop Shopping” for all your communications. That is why it is in Gmail.

Armand: Not force you to see all Buzz comments or be notified of Buzz Comments. I subscribed to Mashable’s Buzz feed and it sucked. I like Mashable it’s just they have a huge amount of comments so it wasn’t a good experience for me, not their fault Google’s fault.

Jack Humphrey and I both agreed, it is a bad idea to follow people like Pete Cashmore (Mashable) in Google Buzz, we both added and removed his profile. If following Pete Cashmore sucks, that’s Pete’s fault for Tweeting every single post thru a robot, not Google’s.

If I tweeted ever single action I took online I would suck too, but I am still trying to see how I can blame my sucking on Google. Seems to have worked for Pete here.

Armand: Michel Fortin stated that it [Buzz] was because of WAVE not doing as well as they had hoped.

Buzz has nothing to do with Google Wave. Wave is for private or public discussion, collaboration and rich social applications.

Buzz is simply the next step in Google Social Search.

Buzz is to keep up with your REAL friends activity on YouTube, Twitter and FriendFeed. Two very different things.

Why do I say REAL friends? Because Buzz is based on your Google Contacts. If you add me to your Google Contacts and I add you then we will see each other in Buzz.

But like I said, making your Google profile URL public will get you more followers and give you the chance to follow others you may not have discovered yet.

You might also notice Google Social Search is doing the same thing as Buzz but in Google results.

So again I do have to point out Google Buzz is not something they made up yesterday, it is part of something much bigger and has been in development for years. They started writing the code for Google Wave in early 2007, over 3 years ago.

This is why Google never launched a Facebook clone, they don’t need to. Think Google Friend Connect, YouTube, Google Reader, Google Wave and now Google Buzz.

And before you mention Orkut, that was to deliver advertising to India and Brazil where Orkut has been king for years. Orkut has nothing to do with the US market and never was intended to.

When you look at the much larger Google picture like I do, you can see that this is a much more rich social set of applications than Facebook ever could be.

I originally wrote this as a comment on Armand’s blog which is where it belonged but as I said, his blog was not accepting comments at the time. Hope this helps you all with Google Buzz.

And you can follow me on Google Buzz right here….

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

I was leery of adding a desktop app that has access to my Google account log in. But when I saw this Google Wave Notifier (new tab) on SourceForge I jumped in and tried it out.

SourceForge is a trusted source for open source applications and is a source you can trust for secure software that is not going to contain back-end malicious apps. Lots of good free professional apps over there too.

The Google Wave Notifier runs on the machine, not in the browser like the FireFox plugin. I did not like that one as I work on slow (2mb maybe) free Wifi connections often and it slowed my browser speed way down at the local coffee house.

This Wave Notifier Does it right, here’s how it works

Look for the logo in the task bar after you install it. Small download too, just 1.5MB.

When it runs for the first time, or each time you boot Windows, it will give you a little slide show of your new Waves.

Even plays a notifacation sound when you have a new Wave. You can turn the setting off and on too by right clicking the icon in the task-bar and selecting options.

Next, click it once and the Google Wave Notifier will give you an overlay like this:

Notice the blue text (arrow)? That is because my mouse (not shown) is hovering over the Wave when I took the screenshot. Each one is a link and if you click it, it takes you to a new tab, loads Gwave and opens the particular Wave that you clicked on. Real time saver over looking for the Wave in a Gwave inbox.

Glad to see this new Wave Notifier working well with all the bells and whistles I would have had to have my programmer build in. Job well done guys. Without this I would find Google Wave way less useful and I think you will too.

Google Wave invites

I just got more invites and on the Christmas Bonus post from last month I have plenty of readers that have invites too. Just shout me via my email on my contact Chris Lang page and we will get you on Google Wave as fast as Google allows. Be sure to include your Gmail that you want to use with Gwave. See you there….

Discuss this in Google Wave here

In fact it has nothing to do with any browser, it has to do with WordPress and how browsers interpret and compile JavaScript. We finally narrowed it down to not the browser but the Wordpress version.

It seems this only occurs on WordPress blogs and is a matter of a WordPress file called prototype.js not being compatible with Google Friend Connect JSON code. prototype.js (JavaScript file) is essential for WordPress sites to work correctly.

This is why I have no problems here on my Google Wave site or any of my other sites. They are all older installs of WordPress.

From Google themselves it of course is a JavaScript error and Google Friend Connect should work after this code addition before the gadget code in WordPress.

<script> window.JSON = { parse: function(st){ return st.evalJSON(); }, stringify: function(obj){ return Object.toJSON(obj); } }; </script>

Right click the textarea above, then “Select all, next right click the highlighted code and select “Copy” and paste the code into your WordPress file just above the Google Friend Connect gadget code. Problem solved, or so we believe.

Usually it will be the sidebar.php file that creates your WordPress sidebar that you will be editing. If you are not familiar with HTML make a back up of the file in Notepad first.

Let us know if this worked for you in the comments….

Hope this helps and your feedback on this will help us all. Let us all know if this fixed your problems on your WordPress blog. Also if you are having this problem and your site is not a WordPress blog let us know that too.

Short and sweet today, we are all too busy with Christmas for my usual.

Chrome is now released for Macs and Linux.

But better yet what has stopped most of us from embracing Google Chrome is lack of a RoboForm plugin or the plugins we use in FireFox.

No more, RoboForm finally woke up and now embraces most browsers or soon will.

Better yet you can use the online RoboForm RoboFrom sync app and use the RoboForm bookmarklet in browsers that do not take plugins. The site also says a Safari will plug in will be available in early 2010.

Now extensions are available for Chrome and now there is a hack or Chrome extensions on Macs.

Hope this helps you get farther from Windows, IE, and FireFox. The speed and stability of Chrome is so worth the migration. Hope these tools help you get a little closer to Google Chrome.

Merry Christmas! – Chris