Google Wants to Help Web Sites Make New Friends

If you run a Web site, you may have a lot of new friends.

Last week, site owners learned they could add information about their users from MySpace and Facebook.

On Monday, Google introduced its take on the same phenomenon, Google Friend Connect.

Google puts two spins on this concept. First, its program is designed to allow very small Web sites to add some social networking features without sophisticated programming. All they have to do is copy a little code onto their Web pages.

Second, Google lets site owners link to a range of other sites, including, for various functions, AOL, Yahoo and Facebook.

“Google Friend Connect is like giving Webmasters a salt shaker full of ’social’ that they can sprinkle on their sites to add social capabilities,” David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google told a conference call of reporters Monday.

Like so much that Google does, the Friend Connect system is rather sketchy at this early stage, with a lot of key details yet to be determined. But it does seem to provide a few features that small Web sites may find appealing.

Friend Connect offers an easy way for sites to let users log in and identify themselves. Users can use their existing user names from AOL, Yahoo, Google and a list of other sites that use the emerging OpenID standard. If you don’t log in to a Google Connect site with a user name from one of its partners, you will be prompted to create a new Google account.

As a second step, users can then link to one or more social networks they participate in, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Hi5 and Google’s Orkut. They can also tap into the Google Talk instant message system, which isn’t a full-blown social network.

These links will import the user’s photograph, nickname and list of friends. (MySpace, a Google partner on a number of other initiatives, doesn’t have the technical infrastructure to support Friends Connect, Mr. Glazer said.)

It’s the friend list that makes things interesting. Say you go to a Web site on a specific topic (Google’s demo is a site for guacamole lovers). Once you log in, you can see the names and photos of all of your friends who are members of that site. Hmm, you say, I never knew that Joey was a guac fanatic. Click, click, click. You might be able to see all of Joey’s comments on the site, his guac reviews, and his killer poblano corn guacamole recipe. Maybe you will even be able to send him a message with a question about why you were never invited to that Cinco de Mayo party.

The way that Web site owners add all these nifty features is through another Google initiative called OpenSocial. Until now, OpenSocial has been a way to write applications for a handful of big sites including Orkut and MySpace. Now any Webmaster that uses Friend Connect will be able to add OpenSocial applications, written by Google and other companies.

What’s not clear is exactly what features will be available and what information will be transferred from social networks to these other sites.

For example, right now Webmasters that participate will not have access to the e-mail addresses of the users who log into their sites through the Google system. That means they can’t send messages to their own users about new features on their sites. In an interview, Mr. Glazer said Google hasn’t gotten around to figuring out whether to do this, and if so, how to give users choices about where their e-mail addresses are sent.

Read more about this topic : Nytimes.com

Strategically, Google has a different objective than MySpace and Facebook. Those networks want to make their systems the central profiles that people use to define their identities on the Web. And their openness initiatives are meant to add more value to those profiles.