Google Monday released a preview version of Friend Connect, a service designed
to let Web publishers add social networking features to their sites.

Friend Connect, which will be available
on the Web at some point on Monday, lets publishers add social networking
applications by inserting "a snippet of code" in their sites, Google
said.

"We're seeing social capabilities get baked into the infrastructure of
the Web. [They're] increasingly not tied to any one site, to any one source
of friends, or any one type of application. We see the Web moving towards an
end state where people can use any apps on any Web sites with any of their friends,"
said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, during a press conference
to discuss Friend Connect.

Thus, sites will be able to add features like user registration, friends invitation
and message posting, as well as allow visitors to interact with existing friends
in social networking sites like Facebook, Google's Orkut, Plaxo and Hi5, according
to Google.

"Google Friend Connect is like giving Webmasters a saltshaker full of
'social' that they can sprinkle on their sites to add social capabilities,"
Glazer said.

Google's move is yet another in a recent string of data-portability efforts
at tearing down the walls in social networking sites and letting users export
the data and content they have stored in those sites. MySpace and Facebook took
steps in that direction with announcements last week.

As the popularity of social networks keeps rising and people set up multiple
profiles in such sites, they are demanding the ability to carry their data,
content and connections from one site to another, so that they don't have to
reenter all that information again.

At the same time, Web publishers of all sizes are eager to latch on to the
craze by adding social networking features to their sites, now that a critical
mass of Internet users have embraced the interaction and sharing that social
applications provide.

Friend Connect makes use of open standards for authentication and authorization
like OpenID and OAuth, and de facto makes any Web site a potential "container"
of social applications built with Google's OpenSocial APIs, Glazer said.

"The entire Web has become a container for OpenSocial apps," he said.

Monday night, Web publishers will be able to sign up to a waiting list to get
access to the Friend Connect service, but Google expects to make the service
available to anyone within a matter of months, officials said.

IDG News Service

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