Google's stepping up its social networking efforts with new features for Friend Connect today, and the features provide some clues as to how Google thinks social data can be used to make money.

Friend Connect provides a way for website owners to give their site social features without having to build an entire social network from scratch. This type of add-on social network tool has been increasingly popular in the last year and a half--Friend Connect competes with offerings such as Facebook Connect, which was announced around the same time, in the first half of 2008. Google says that about 9 billion web sites use Friend Connect, and that the service receives about half a billion unique page views each month.

The new Friend Connect features collect more data about a site's visitors and provide several ways to use it. A polling gadget gathers information about visitors' interests, which is then shared between sites.

Using this feature, a music site could find out which bands are their viewers' favorites, and a fashion site could discover a user's favorite clothing brands. A new direct messaging feature also allows Friend Connect users to contact others with similar interests. The music site could, for example, send newsletters targeted to users who've expressed an interest in certain 90s grunge bands. Or visitors might be served links to the most recent articles about these bands.

But perhaps most importantly for advertising dollars--and one must always remember that Google is an advertising company at heart--user profiles come with an integrated set of tools that a site owner can use to provide personalized information, ads, and services.

Most conveniently, Google has now integrated AdSense with FriendConnect, allowing site owners to fine-tune the ads displayed based on users' interests, as well as site content.

Google's vision of advertising has always been about presenting ad content at the moment people are actively seeking such information, and the company has always employed sophisticated analytics to do this.

FriendConnect's new features look like a solid step toward monetizing social data. While social networking sites still struggle with this--users of those sites are usually looking to socialize, and not to buy things--FriendConnect's advantage is that the social data can be used to catch users when they're looking for useful information or even thinking about making a purchase.

The video below demonstrates the new features.

A few days ago, social networking site Facebook revealed more details about an initiative called Facebook Connect, a service that will let partners integrate the company's social networking features with their site.

More and more sites that provide content--including Technology Review--require registration to access certain features, like adding comments to articles. But with Facebook Connect, people can use their Facebook identification to log-on, comment on stories, and even post their activity to their Facebook news feed.

According to the New York Times, a number of sites will soon be using Facebook's service, including the Discovery Channel, The San Francisco Chronicle, the news aggregation site Digg, the genealogy network Geni, and online video site Hulu.

Techcrunch also recently announced its participation in Facebook Connect:

TechCrunch readers can now use their Facebook accounts to sign in before leaving comments. Doing so yields several benefits. Most immediately, you'll no longer have to enter a name, email address and website manually before dropping your two cents. Just click once on the "Connect" button that sits next to the comment form and we'll automatically detect who you are, even on return visits.

Hooking things up with Facebook also lets us display your profile portrait in miniature form next to your name in the header of comments. Your name conveniently links to your Facebook profile as well, making it easier for other commenters to get in touch with you and perhaps become your virtual friends. But Facebook Connect doesn't let information flow just one way. You can now post notifications of your comments to your Facebook wall whenever contributing here on TechCrunch.

After hitting the "Add Comment" button, just select a type of feed item (which Facebook calls a "story") and your friends on Facebook will have the chance to appreciate your snark and wit.

In many ways, Facebook Connect is a more thoughtful version of Beacon, the failed advertising program that Facebook introduced last year. Beacon proved so controversial because it didn't warn users properly when their actions on other sites would be broadcast to their Facebook network. Facebook Connect should also appeal to sites that have struggled to build their own social network of users, as well as to users who want a single log-on for many sites.

However, it's still unclear how fine the privacy controls will be. In a Techcrunch post, which includes a screen shot, it looks as though users can choose between "always" or "never" sharing their posts on Facebook. Presumably any action in between must be taken manually, something that some users may quickly grow weary of.