To document what Google faces everyday to deliver not just Google Friend Connect, but all the top notch apps to us, here is one reason why Google Friend Connect mutual friends may not be showing in Gmail right now
Let me start by saying, Google Friend Connect mutual friends DEFINITELY show up in Gmail because I have over 400 myself. I have built this list over the last nine months and I was the one that discovered this in September, 2008.
GFC friends in Gmail has been down before
When Google was getting to release the Google Latitude platform, the whole month before no one was getting GFC mutual friends in their Gmail contacts list. I documented this in Google Bugs Gone Latitude in February 2009.
Then when Google did unveil and full release of Google Latitude, suddenly there was a flood of new contacts in my Gmail address book.
So why does yours not work now
I have been testing and analyzing this for NINE months, I know it works. So just because you added 30 or 40 friends thru a Google Friend Connect gadget in the last month, now you can say I am wrong about this?
I have built a very responsive Google Friend Connect list over nine months, using GFC. So just because you tried it for a few weeks and it did not work, I am totally wrong? That is why I am an analyst and you are a blogger. You don’t have time to watch this day in and day out.
This is how I make my living, by having the long term results of what I teach. Not the off the top of their heads, jumping to conclusions, first time user of GFC inaccurate opinion on this.
When I tell you something it is because we know it works. We can’t control what services Google delivers, but we can tell when something is fact, to the best of my knowledge, a theory and just a very educated guess.
I label everything I publish here with those exact limitations. So, when I say “Google Friend Connect mutual friends are added to Gmail and Google Reader” then it is a fact or I would be a liar, disseminating worthless information that is going to waste your time.
But most of all how do you know these people USE GMAIL?
How do you know that the people you friend use Gmail? You don’t, but yet because your mutual friend does not show up in Gmail you immediately say I don’t know what I am talking about.
Then you go and use two of your own Gmail accounts to friend yourself and you say that proves I am wrong. Come on, this is the worst test in the world. You can’t know what is going on behind the scenes at Google and neither can I. But at least I have been testing it for nine months.
Google is moving to IPv6 and even has been off line for an hour
There was even a Google outage and Google is moving the the new way a network is built and this has cause many Google apps not to function properly.
Just like when Latitude was released and I suddenly saw a flood of new mutual friends added to Gmail and Google Reader, I expect the same to happen after Google move this new IP protocol.
What is IPv6?
IPv6 is needed because the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support approximately 4.3 billion individually addressed devices on the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression — 2 to the 128th power — can quantify its size.
Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company’s applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol.
“We can provide all Google services over IPv6,” said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held here Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
IPv6 is explained here for those that want to totally understand the tech side of this as I do.
Google Friend Connect bottom line
Give it some time, don’t jump to conclusions and take the advice of those who know what is really going on, like Jack Humphrey who knows the whole story because he got it from what he calls the number one Google Friend Connect expert.
Hi Chris – thanks for the explanation. Do I recognise myself in parts of your answer? If it is me, I think you’ve read the wrong impression. I said maybe I was nuts and I knew you weren’t, so requested an explanation. If someone implied you didn’t know what you were talking about, wasn’t me.
Just for clarification
Cheers,
Mark
@Mark,
If you look to Jack’s blog,
http://www.googlingsocial.com/?p=283
where I addressed the comment there directly to you, that much was directly meant for you.
The rest of what I had to say on that was here and that was directed directly at a few people who keep poking at me over this issue.
It is the only hole these guys can find in my system, and since it is in my public info my wannabee competition keeps playing this card.
Today’s post was the one time I will respond to this underhanded ploy and now it is a dead issue once and for all.
I just wanted to wait until I had documentation to back up what we see happening.
Little marketing lesson here, don’t deal with naysayers until you have documentation to back it up. Then you end the drama right there. LOL
Cool?
No worries
Well, for about 15 minutes on my site it seemed Google Friend Connect was down and it slowed me to a crawl.
@Jim Gaudet,
That can be any number of things, an outage between you and Google, a update to the code on Google’s servers or an update to your datacenter.
You do realize that we get different versions of the code and Google results between different datacenters, don’t you?
I may see a site ranked top 10 while the same search in your geographic area produces a different top 10 SERP.
Google has tons of datacenters and depending on what that datacenter has in it’s code is what you get on your machine. So all results, even the speed at which Google delivers the output that creates Google Friend Connect gadget on your site will vary.
Also this was written well before the Google Wave release. So it is not only prophetic but also a little outdated as there is now something else going on if you are experiencing what to me is a good thing, new code being updated.
Something is definitely going on at Google Friend Connect. Today not one avatar from my friends list in Gmail would load and I have not pulled any new contacts from friend requests.
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.
BigChief SEOless of the Whitehat clan:
Chris Lang
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.
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 of 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 * com 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