Google has today
announced the release of
Google Friend Connect, a service that enables website owners to add social networking elements to their own site.
By adding a small amount of code, website owners can add features such as user registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, reviews and third party applications from
Google?s OpenSocial initiative.
In a statement just issued, Google?s director of engineering, David Glazer said, "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. Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality."
Google Friend Connect allows users on any site (using the service) to see, invite and interact with friends using other social networking sites such as Facebook, hi5, orkut, iLike and Plaxo.