Google Friend Connect at Google Campfire One

Yesterday, Google announced the preview release of Google Friend Connect at Campfire One. "Google Friend Connect enables webmasters to quickly and easily enhance their site with community features; what's more, these features leverage visitors' existing social ties. By simply copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript, you can implement the social functionality you want, and visitors can connect with their Facebook, orkut and other friends directly on your website."
Here's a video from Campfire One introducing Friend Connect.



From a press release on May 12:

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening's Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

"Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social," said David Glazer, a 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. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality."

Here’s also a video provided by Google that explains how developers can add Friend Connect to their websites:



Last week, in the same direction, Myspace and Facebook announced two competing products MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect.