Interested in adding social network applications such as user registration, friend invitation, and message posting to your site, but aren't the code guru you should be? Google's Friend Connect lets you set it all up, programming skills not required.Many of today's Web sites "get" the whole Web 2.0 thing. People like to be able to participate in and interact with the communities and media they consume. InformationWeek, for example, permits you -- our dear readers -- to post comments about blog posts and interact with the writers and other readers. For a company like TechWeb, which backs the InformationWeek Web site, it's not that big a deal. Enough Web developers are on hand to make it happen. But that's not the case for everyone.

Some sites, like my own personal blog, don't have this or other social functionalities. Why? Because I am not a programmer. I can barely handle basic HTML. Something more complex, such as members' galleries? Pshaw. Fuhgeddaboutit. Starting today, I might find some salvation with Google's Friend Connect.

According to a press release, "Any Web site 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."

Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the Web. First, many Web site owners (myself included) want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the Web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.

How much traction Friend Connect gets will be dependent, at least in part, on how pervasive the use of certain social networking sites becomes. True, many millions of people already have joined one social network or another, but not everyone takes advantage of all that they can do.

There are far more social networks than just Facebook and MySpace. Tying them all together and letting existing users interact with their buddies in "off deck" areas could help grow social network sites more, as well as drive traffic to the sites that empower them to do so.