Google helps website owners make their site social

Google Inc. in an effort to make the web more social has introduced a new tool to enable people to interact with their friends. Using the tool website owners will be able to use the hosted application to allow interactions with visitors from social-networking sites such as Facebook and Orkut, by copying and pasting snippets of code into their site.

Google's initiative, called "Friend Connect," follows path of MySpace and Facebook last week to allow their users to transport their personal profiles and applications to other web sites. Friend Connect-compliant sites will be able to view, invite, and interact with newfound friends, or with existing friends, from established social-networking sites, including Facebook, Google Talk, Hi5, Orkut, and Plaxo via secure authorization application-programming interfaces.

Here is a video explaining Google's Friend Connect.

Friend Connect provides wizardlike pages. Webmasters just fill in the information, select social apps, copy code, paste, and save. No coding is required. It passes the 'easy' test, and it does something useful.

Google hopes its latest social tools will encourage people to spend even more time online, giving the company more opportunities to show the advertising that generates most of its profits.