In a recent announcement from Google this morning, their new social media platform is expected to launch soon. The service is called Friend Connect. Now any website owner can provide social features to its visitors. All you have to do is add a snippet of code and features such as user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications will run immediately without programming.
David Glazer, director of engineering at Google said "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."
Friend Connect is currently in limited beta stage and only a few sites are using the applications and features. Friend Connect will be open to more sites in the next few weeks as Google receives feedback from site owners and developers about how well the product is performing.