4D Interactive Weblog

Google is to make the web more social by introducing tools that will enable people to interact with their friends.

Friend Connect follows plans announced last week by the world’s two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook.

Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other websites.

“Social is in the air,” says Google’s director of engineering David Glazer.

During a conference call at Google’s California headquarters, Mr Glazer told reporters: “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.”

Google’s Open Social will allow third parties to build and develop applications for the site.

“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.