Google Friend Connect Now Available!

Google Friend Connect is now available in beta. This service lets webmasters add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code. The company explains 'Friend Connect' makes it easy for anyone to sign in to a website, share a little bit about themselves through a personal profile, discover other people with similar interests, invite their contacts and interact with friends.
The Friend Connect service also lets users log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo!, AOL or OpenID. Similarly, one can choose to either establish a new profile or use profiles and friend sources from other social networks that have opened up their services, like Plaxo and orkut. Friend Connect also includes YouTube videos in your comments.

"Friend Connect's goal is to facilitate an open social Web. Using open standards like OpenID and OAuth, Friend Connect makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit. Additionally, websites that use Friend Connect become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community," concludes Google.