Google Friend Connect: a social network for every site

On Monday night, Google launched its entry into the growing field of programs that attempt to share your "social graph" -- your collection of friends and relationships -- across many social networks. The program is called Friend Connect, and it's starting with a handful of sites, including Facebook, Plaxo and Hi5. Friend Connect is also going to support applications under OpenSocial, Google's social network application platform that has been around since last November.

For the average web user, Friend Connect means you're going to see social data cropping up on a whole bunch of websites that never included social networks before. You'll basically be able to plug in your information from any of the participating networks where you have a profile, and then you can interact with other users of the site who do the same. It's basically like a mini-Facebook built into any site.

What does this mean for site owners? Well, Google is promising to make setting up Friend Connect on your site ridiculously easy -- which is why we think you're going to start seeing it everywhere on the web. It basically generates the entire code for you, to be pasted into your existing site. If you're interested in trying it out, you can apply to Google now.

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