Comments on: Google Friend Connect Adds 8 Seconds To Page Load Time

By: Chris Myles

Chris Myles — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:21:08 +0000

I haven’t had that much luck in any of my discussions with Blogger. It’s sad and the worst part is they don’t even support their external developers who basically can add value for free.

Google runs each of their groups like a startup but they forget about the most important element.. customer support/satisfaction. In a startup someone better be focused on the full customer experience, something that appears to be missing based on the low level of integration that exists (vs the way it could be). In many cases their own tools don’t even play well together!!

As for stuck.. posterous has a great Blogger import function and MUCH better support. That’s where you find me..

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 13:02:11 +0000

I gave Rick / Blogger a bit of a talking down to in regards SEO 6 months ago – all they needed to do was remove one line in their robots.txt & possibly change their search URLs so they didn’t clash with their topic links in wildcards.
It wasn’t fixed, Blogger blogs are still screwed and people stuck there are still stuck.

By: Chris Myles

Chris Myles — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:29:14 +0000

I don’t know if you’ve seen the ridiculously long load times in Blogger.. but they’ve moved to a “each gadget is a GFC container” method. Each gadget loads in an iframe and then queries back to get any relevant feed or post data (for each gadget). If you load a map of recent post and

I’m sure Blogger will learn any tricks around the speed test but the end result is the same, the reader will have to wait. It’s really sad considering they have awesome javascript access so you can do intelligent things to improve load/viewing performance, but Blogger seems adamant in their direction. What’s worse is developing a Blogger gadget require yet another gadget methodology, while adapting DOM based javascript is a two minute exercise.

Maybe that’s why the Blogger developers group is a ghost town.

By: Mark Bell

Mark Bell — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:57:37 +0000

I’m not entirely sure how accurate the Google site performance tools are at the moment; they are still a “Labs” feature, so I’d expect them to be a little flaky. My average page load time seems to fluctuate pretty wildly, and it also reports that none of my content is gzipped, when I know for a fact that it is.

The asynchronous loading of things like Analytics seems like a really good idea though, and I agree that this should be available for other Google services (I imagine it probably will be before too long).

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:56:16 +0000

To be honest you would probably gain more benefit from Facebook

Google Friend Connect has benefits for content sites, but probably a lot less benefit for ecommerce.

By: Todd Daugherty

Todd Daugherty — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:59:39 +0000

I am getting on the bandwagon and installing the Google friends toolbar on my website. It is really dis-heartening that it has really caused load-times to plummet. I hope Google doesn’t count that against us, considering it is their own product….

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:46:01 +0000

Hmm 5.6 is low compared to mine, and you have GFC as well.

By: Mathdelane

Mathdelane — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:19:02 +0000

Looks like I’ve been missing a lot of stuff lately but an openDNS from Google? Seriously. The last time I’ve used openDNS was when I transferred hosting to speed up DNS propagation and that’s just about it. I stopped using openDNS since I couldn’t see much difference in speed while browsing. I definitely know how to tweak my PC so maybe I was a little unobservant. I’m not sure if I’ll give it a try.

By: Mathdelane

Mathdelane — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:25:48 +0000

I’ve been so wary of using any Google gadgets on my blog after doing some tests on page loading speed. Even YSlow says the same thing with Google js scripts. I only have one left–Google translate. I wonder if I’m really getting much from it but I’ll soon find out otherwise I”ll have to give it up except for Adsense.

The other thing that worries me is its impact for bloggers earning from banner ads due to its impact on the number of HTTP requests. The same thing with blogs with moderate pagerank like mine.

By: Kevin Spence

Kevin Spence — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:33:00 +0000

I also wonder what percentage of websites have virtually nothing on them or haven’t been updated since 2002. I mean, your site may not be blazing fast, but as a user, it in no way feels slow.