Google has announced a new service, "Friend Connect" with the intent on being at the heart of social networking. "Google Friend Connect is about being the 'long tail' of sites becoming more social. 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." said Google's director of engineering David Glazer in a call with reporters. With Friend Connect, any website owner can add a bit of google's code to their site and get social features running right away without any programming. Features such as invitations to member's gallery, message walls, and reviews. "Social networking is going mainstream. It used to be proprietary, but now it's going to be open and baked into the infrastructure of the net, not just one site or one source," says Mr Glazer. The BBC has more here.
