Google News, Inside.

Early this week, Google introduced a new service named Google Friend Connect. “Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.”

Here are some of the main points that the new service highlights and will give you the ability to do.

• Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.
• Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.
• No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Wait a second…this feels a lot like an advanced version of MyBlogLog.com. But, there is a twist. It doesn’t just interact with a single social network, it can interact with almost any network you want it to.

There are a number of different features you will be able to use for Friend Connect. There will be rating widgets, member community widgets, and plenty of other “social” widgets that you can plugin to your site.

There is a primary focus of using these social gadgets though. Like stated above, “no programming whatsoever.” That’s critical for the product to really hit the critical mass of the industry. If they want users to use it, they need it to be easy.

Does Friend Connect compete with Google’s own OpenSocial application? Definitely not. OpenSocial is a set of APIs available to developers. Friend Connect may end up bring a front-end layer to OpenSocial, but it’s geared more towards everyday users rather than developers.

Here is a quick very long 7-minute video about how to use Friend Connect. Again, it’s very long, but it’s very in-depth to how to use Friend Connect.

Lastly, you can view more details about Friend Connect.