Google announces Friend Connect

On the heels of similar announcements from Facebook and MySpace last week, Google on Monday announced plans to make its applications available to outside Web sites.

The offering, dubbed Google Friend Connect, will go live on Monday night and will let webmasters add Google social features like chat to their Web sites with just a few clicks.

Since the launch of its OpenSocial development platform last year, Google has been "building the social plumbing of the Web," David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, said during a conference call with reporters. "Six months ago, we probably couldn't have done this."

Users want applications "baked in" to their favorite Web sites. "Ninety-nine percent of the Web sites out there are not social networks, [but] they do make sense as a place to be social," Glazer said.

Webmasters will be able to take a "salt shaker full of social [apps] that they can sprinkle on their sites [with] no coding and hardly any typing," he said.

Friend Connect will utilize OpenID, which will allow people to log-in with a variety of usernames, whether they be from Yahoo, AOL, or Google, said Mussie Shore, product manager for Friend Connect. It will also allow users to pull friends' lists from other sites like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo and more, he said.

Kraus expects that within a few days, Google will select up to 2,000 Web sites from its wait list to go live with Friend Connect.