Google Friend Connect – Make Any Website Social

Google Friend Connect, is a new service from Google, that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or with existing friends from social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, hi5, and more.

Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites.

• Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
• Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
• Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

The service is not fully out yet, but it you want to get it first, sign up for preview release.

Following is video introduction of this new service. More information can  be found here. Also do not forget to check few example sites.

If turn out to be successful, this will raise Google’s share in social-networking market. Friend connect will also increase user-base for OpenSocial apps as explained by Dan Peterson in his recent post on OpenSocial API Blog.

Link: Google Friend Connect (via TechCrunch)