If your like me your probably already exploring what FriendConnect is all about and in what interesting ways you can break^H^H use it.

Now remember the OpenSocial Dev App (or OSDA as we lovingly call it)? If not you should! It’s an incredibly nifty application that allows you to type in OpenSocial javascript directly into an edit box and execute it on the fly, making it a awesome way to poke at FriendConnect.

With it you can explore how it exposes the Owner (which is the site), Owner friends (the members of the site), the Viewer (that’s you! unless your not signed in, in which case you’ll get a lovely “badRequest: Cannot ask for viewer when anonymous” error as it should do), viewer friends, etc.

Also you see what profile details are available through GFC by going to the canvas view (click on the canvas tab), and go to the “Data Viewer” tab, select one of the options like “Viewer”, and click “Show details” to see a full dump of the person object with all it’s available fields.

To add this to your FC enabled site, goto http://www.google.com/friendconnect select “Social Gadgets”, “Custom Gadget >” and enter: “http://osda.appspot.com/gadget/osda-0.8.xml” as the URL and copy and paste the generated html into your site.

In my case I’ve added the generated HTML to a wordpress page (yes that is possible), and presto we have a OSDA running on GFC on a wordpress site! Ah I love it when you can combine technologies to make something cool happen

See http://www.chabotc.com/osda/ for my OSDA gadget on this GFC enabled site.

Happy hacking!