Easily insert social features to make "any app, any site, any friends" a reality

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 12, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Tonight at Campfire One at the Googleplex
(http://code.google.com/campfire/), Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) will
announce a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that
helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to
easily provide social features for its visitors.

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social
-- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see
http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening's Campfire
One), any website 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.

To illustrate, independent musician Ingrid Michaelson has added
music features from iLike with Google Friend Connect and is now able
to run the iLike OpenSocial application on her official website
(www.ingridmichaelson.com). As a result, starting tonight, fans who
visit Ingrid's site can connect with their friends without having to
leave the site. Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from
their social networks, add music to their profiles, see who is
attending concerts, and enjoy other features of the iLike application,
all at Ingrid's website. With Google Friend Connect, people will be
able to enjoy their favorite features with their friends on any
website across the web.

"We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every
eyeball to us," said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. "Friend Connect
is a significant opportunity for iLike, artists, and fans. The iLike
Artist Dashboard(TM) will be the first content-management system that
allows artists not only to post their songs, concerts, and videos to
every leading social network from one dashboard, but also to
simultaneously manage the content on their own websites."

Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to
the spread of social features across the web. First, many website
owners 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.

"Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites
become more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at
Google. "Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily
want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their
visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately,
there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth,
OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google,
MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards
to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on
the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality."

For Site Owners: Traffic and User Engagement

Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives
site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors
a way to connect with friends on their websites.

-- Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring
their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their
activities on those sites back into their social network,
attracting even more visitors.

-- Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial
applications provides more interesting content and richer
social experiences.

-- Less work: any site can have social components without hiring
a programming team or becoming a social network.

Google Friend Connect is in a preview release, available tonight
after Campfire One on a handful of whitelisted websites. All site
owners interested in learning more about Google Friend Connect and
signing up for the wait list can visit
http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ starting tonight. In the weeks
ahead we will be turning on more sites, adding more social
applications, and integrating feedback from site owners and
developers.

Google I/O

Learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other
social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about
building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May
28-29 at Moscone West, San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at
http://code.google.com/events/io/.

Conference Call Information

Google will host a conference call to discuss this announcement.
The conference call will be held on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 9:30 a.m.
Pacific Time (12:30 p.m. Eastern Time). To access the conference call,
please dial +1 (800) 776-0087 within the United States and +1 (913)
312-1509 from international locations. Replays of both calls will be
available until midnight Eastern Time, May 19, 2008 at +1 (888)
203-1112 domestically and +1 (719) 457-0820 internationally. The
confirmation code for the replay of the call is 7571843.

About Google Inc.

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people
around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by
Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a
top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted
advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable
results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google
is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the
Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

SOURCE: Google Inc.

Google
Sean Carlson, +1 650 253 1173
seanc@google.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008