Google aims to make web sites more social and connect friends

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 13 May 2008 15:27

Business IT - Networking

"Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. "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 is in a preview release and is currently available on a handful of whitelisted websites. All site owners interested in learning more about Google Friend Connect and signing up for the wait list can now visit http://www.google.com/friendconnect/. Google says that in the weeks ahead it will be turning on more sites, adding more social applications, and integrating feedback from site owners and developers.