The key point to acknowledge here is that Google is encouraging people to create more plug-ins for it, and it will be available through WordPress, Drupal, and phpbb plugins making it accessible to a whole lot of the web.

Google Friend Connect will be easily usable with not only blogs, but forums and content management systems. It's completely open and built on open social.

Out of this, publishers can get: more user participation; more comments and higher -quality comments, less spam; more interactions: questions, answers, votes; flexibility - widgets, etc.

This is an important step for data portability. We have not seen Google Friend Connect truly take off yet like it could, and this might get it pushed in that direction.

Cutts says it's not perfect yet, and it's not live yet, but it will be in an hour or two. More on this as we find out...

A few other tidbits coming from the Q&A with Matt Cutts: Twitter followers will not help your page rank. Does CTR or other behavioral metrics on SERPS affect ranking? It would be really spammy and noisy.

Cutts says he can't promise Google would never use its wiki results...

Source: www.webpronews.com