The Race For Social Network Dominance

Google just anounced this morning Friend Connect, it’s own data portability network. It while require almost no programming knowledge to add social network features to your site, according to google:

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.

They include api connection to other netwroking platforms, also they add open id to the package. Nice.

Ok so someone else jumped in the wagon, sho would have their services adopted massively? Who knows , but the race is on. I would honestly have Google to handle all of this rather than Facebook.