The drive for an interoperable social Web continues as Google rolls out Friend Connect service. By Kenneth Corbin: More stories by this author: Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has picked up the banner of the social Web by launching an initiative to bring...

Google wants to give a helping hand to all site owners who face traffic challenges, and the best way to do that is by giving the site a little makeover and offering social features to any visitor through Google Friend Connect. From now on, no matter how social or not social the site is, Google’s new service will provide easy to set up social features that will enable visitors to make new friends or stay in touch with old ones, including from social networking sites like Facebook, hi5 and even Google Talk.

“Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social,” said David Glazer, 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.”

Site owners will find it easy to benefit from the social features offered by Friend Connect without any programming skills, and at the same time, users won’t have to recreate their friends list over and over again.

“Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards – OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and...
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