It seems that Google has joined the drive to make the web more social by introducing Friend Connect - a service designed to enable people to interact with their friends.The unveiling of Friend Connect follows similar services announced last week by the world's two biggest social networking sites, MySpace's Data Availability and Facebook's Connect, allowing users to move their personal profiles and applications to other websites.
During a conference call at Google's California headquarters, David Glazer, Google's director of engineering told reporters: "Google Friend Connect is about being the 'long tail' of sites becoming more social. Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard."
Using Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running right away without complicated programming knowledge. These social features can be anything from member's galleries and message walls to reviews, in addition to applications built by third-parties connected through the OpenSocial developer community.
As an example of how Friend Connect will work in practice, the service has been added to the website of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson. Visitors can see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles and see who is attending local concerts.
As to what is motivating this move into social networking, Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester told BBC News: "As 99% of sites are not currently socially enabled, Friend Connect has a big potential market in front of it" and Ms Li says the route to all things profitable in this space will be through tapping into "the deep profit and user data flowing through Friend Connect." - In other words, mining that information through advertising.
Facebook and MySpace are expecting to roll out their offerings over the next few weeks, and with over 270 million users between them, it is clear Google Friend Connect is facing some stiff competition ahead.
Google says it is being cautious about approving sites to use Friend Connect and is creating a waiting list for requests to use the new code. The search engine says it expects to give the go-ahead to a few dozen sites in the next few days. As to opening out to a wider audience, Google says it estimates that will happen over the coming months.
