Google, which lost out to Microsoft in October for a share of Facebook, Monday began rolling out a Friend Connect service designed to seed social-networking features throughout the Web.

Google’s service, in “preview release,” is designed to let non-programmers add a “snippet of code” and get features on their Web sites like user registration, invitations, members gallery and message posting.

Google Friend Connect could be an early step toward decoupling such features from popular social-networking destination sites like Facebook, backed by Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, and MySpace, acquired by News Corp. for $580 million in 2005. But in a conference call Monday, David Glazer, Google’s director of engineering, said the service would not detract from “the value” of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and its own Orkut, whose businesses are based on attracting and monetizing millions of users.

Mr. Glazer said the initiative would extend social networking to “the long tail” of small, specialized Web sites that will be able to carry social networking data along with the major sites.

As the move toward a socially networked Web gains momentum, major social network destinations—in danger of becoming walled gardens in an open environment—are beginning to free the data planted by users. Last week MySpace, Yahoo, Twitter and eBay announced a data portability initiative to let users share their profile data with outside Web sites. That was followed within days by the announcement of pending “Facebook Connect” data portability features.

In November, Google rolled out its OpenSocial program to create a set of common application programming interfaces to make it easier for developers to build social applications on the Web.

Visitors to sites embedded with Google Friend Connect code will be able to network with people on sites including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut and Plaxo.

Only a handful of Web sites will be going live with Friend Connect tonight in a limited release and one or two dozen more are expected within a few days.
 
Mr. Glazer said the program expedites the expansion of social activity that has been “bottled up” on a few sites.

“It’s like a salt shaker full of social they can sprinkle on their sites,” he said.

As part of the demonstration, the Web site of indie musician Ingrid Michaelson, http://www.ingridmichaelson.com/, is scheduled to be adding features from music-sharing destination iLike.com.