Back in August, I took a look at Google Friend Connect, Newsletters, Drupal, and other stuff. At the time I decided not to use the Drupal module and to simply hard code some Drupal blocks. Since then, I’ve played a little more with newsletters and Google Friend Connect, and talked about it over on the Adgitize Forum, including sending out a Google Friend Connect newsletter targeted to my readers who have said that they use Adgitize.

Then, I stumbled across a question on Quora, What is better: Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect? An anonymous person commented

Facebook Connect is about a million miles ahead.

Google Friend Connect is pretty much a failed product that has been abandoned.

Well, I seem to see a lot of blogs that have various Google Friend Connect gadgets on them and I seem to get more people ‘liking’ my blog with Facebook Connect. So, I thought I’d take a closer look at some of the data.

As I write this, I have 3191 followers on Twitter. TwitterCounter shows 47 Twitter users. However, only 12 of these are people that actually follow me on Twitter.

On Facebook, I have 1863 friends. 231 people have followed my blog via Networked blogs. 11 have connected with Facebook Connect and three have liked the Orient Lodge Facebook page I’ve set up.

With Google, there are currently 292 people that have connected. It seems to be better at making connections than Facebook or Twitter. MyBlogLog is another site where I’ve gotten a lot of connections. Currently, the number stands at 700. We shall see what happens if MyBlogLog goes away. There are also 80 people reading Orient Lodge listed via BlogCatalog and a handful on BlogFrog. What is not explored is the overlap of these communities.

I installed the Facebook Connect Drupal Module and you can see a few new link and share options. So far, I haven’t seen a lot of interest with Facebook Connect, other than that it seems to connect a little more nicely with Drupal than Google Friend Connect. I have left on the Facebook Connect Comment feature, so now people can leave comments in Facebook, Disqus or Drupal.

Bottom line? It sure doesn’t look like Google Friend Connect is a failed product that has been abandoned. There are plenty of social network graph recent reader and everything else widgets and gadgets around. Each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages. I’ll keep exploring many of them. So which tools do you like and why?