Google Friend Connect Harnesses OpenSocial

Google's attempt at social networking will allow all sites to add social networking easily, and tie together disparate social networks like MySpace and Facebook with OpenSocial and other standards.

Though rumors of a Google social platform has swirled for months, the specifics of the tech giant’s approach to social networking have been vague and unconfirmed up until Monday, when Google formally announced the service’s launch. Google Friend Connect will serve as a flexible social networking app that can be customized and built into any site easily, allowing visitors to interact without hosts dealing with the massive backend usually required to support a social network.

For instance, site owners setting up their own Friend Connect service will be able to dabble with features like user registration, invitations, members galleries, message posting, reviews, and even third-party applications. Since the service will support a wide variety of social data standards, including OpenSocial, users will also be able to import data from other sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.

Google’s direct of engineering, David Glazer, said Friend Connect should allow sites that aren’t built solely as social networks to still derive the benefits of them. “Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social,” he said in a statement. “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.”

Friend Connect will launch Monday night, when Google’s Friend Connect landing page will go live, providing more details. One of the earliest implementations of Friend Connect, a version of iLike customized for musician Ingrid Michaelson, will also crop up on her site tonight.