Earlier this month, the Google team released "Friend Connect", a platform that lets webmasters add social featurs to their sites. The tool, which currently works on WordPress and Twitter among others, was however developed with the main goal to generate additional income for the company in order to better face the ongoing financial crisis.

According to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, in fact, Google employees have even started referring to the project as "Google FriendSense" since the company plans to insert advertising within the widget and profit from the webmasters who choose to feature the tool on their sites.

Friend Connect, which makes use of Google's OpenSocial platform, allows users to sign into a site through their Google or Yahoo! IDs. Facebook, hi5, Orkut and Plaxo users can also conveniently sign up with their ID, while Google promises that more options are soon to come. According to TechCrunch, one of such options will be the possibility to add Google AdSense to the platform, with webmasters gaining a percentage on the clicks generated from their sites.

The Google team released a preview of the platform back in May, and since then it claims to have been closely working with website owners, social networks, and application developers to improve its speed and scalability, ease of use, and customization capabilities.

The gadgets that are currently part of the Friend Connect platform, which can be easily embedded in a third-party website, include "rate and comment" functionality, the ability to add new users as friends and interact with them, and several more that are currently being developed by the Google team. To install Friend Connect, webmasters only need to embed the corresponding snippets in the HTML code of their websites: more information can be found at this ad

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By providing a de facto "umbrella product" that groups all social networks together and allowing them to interact with each other, Friend Connect certainly has the potential to become one of Google's main products, especially given the importance social networking and interaction has acquired lately in the IT industry.

Being the owner of Orkut, by far the most popular networking website in countries such as Brazil and India, isn't enough for Google: if Arrington's allegations are correct, this would mean that the company is now trying to reach a potentially much larger user base and trying to "steal" their advertising space — and, of course, revenue — in the process.

Just yesterday, another TechCrunch article by Erick Schonfeld was speculating what would happen if Google were to acquire Facebook: according to the reporter, the poor Facebook search capabilities and Google's poor social interaction capabilities would disappear, with the former being able to make user search much more efficient and the latter being able to embed people profiles in its Web search.

To Schonfeld, the ability to search friends' thoughts, interests and activities would provide a better experience, allowing searches for restaurants, books or movies to turn up written recommendations from user's acquaintances or, when searching for a travel destination, allowing users to find out which contacts have been to a given country and seek for personal recommendation.

But, as the reporter underlines, this is nothing but speculation: as far as we know, there are no plans for Google to even partner with the popular networking site, let alone acquiring it, especially given that the search engine giant is seemingly trying to cut its costs and acquisitions considerably by reportedly laying off an estimated 3,000 contractors and even by cutting on the employees' Christmas bonus.