There is a huge land rush going on for social networks and for the longest time, Google has been on the outside, looking in. Myspace, FaceBook, LinkedIn have all come along and created huge audiences for social networks; smaller players have carved valuable niches, such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and so on.

But Google has failed singularly to come up with its own successful social network. Until now.

Introducing: Google Friends Connect…

Google writes: “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. 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.”

Google Friends Connect is a way to bring the social networking world out into the real world allowing webmasters to add a simple code element, visit the website, and configure the social networking features required. This turning the social world inside out is going to be very welcome to webmasters and users and will enable new ways to find existing websites. The walled worlds of FaceBook, Linked In and so on have been pretty frustrating for me: I hate having to login each day just to get useless updates and waste time removing or adding pointless applications that have little relationship with the rest of the web. This will a terrific advance for bloggers, who although they use social networking a lot, find that social networking means that they and their visitors are now interacting OFF the website, not on it. Why maintain two or even more subsidiary sites when you can maintain one primary site!?

Just watch the video.