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.

Verizon Wireless and Motorola officially launched the Droid phone this morning at an event in New York. The announcement confirmed the device specifications that leaked last week--and made official the phone's rumored $199.99 price.

Verizon's "Droid Does" ad campaign has already positioned the smartphone as a direct competitor to Apple's iPhone. The Droid's combination of features and price--which essentially match those of the iPhone 3GS--also put Verizon and Motorola in a strong position to challenge the prestige and smartphone market share that AT&T and Apple have enjoyed for the past two years.

Motorola's new Droid is the first smartphone to run Google's Android 2.0 OS. (Courtesy Motorola)

The Droid is the first device to run the second generation of Google's Android operating system, which the company released to developers yesterday. Android 2.0 adds support for the ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange e-mail server and makes it easier for users to access contacts and multiple e-mail accounts. Android 2.0 also supports HTML5, the next major revision of the core markup language of the Web; eventually, the W3C hopes that HTML5 will replace the need for proprietary "rich-content" plugins such as Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

A few of the Droid's features--such as a physical keyboard, built-in voice recognition for many applications, and multitasking--could give it a slight edge over the iPhone. The biggest potential advantage, however, is Verizon's 3G network, which is much larger than AT&T's. iPhone owners tend to use much more bandwidth than other AT&T customers, which has slowed Web browsing, e-mail syncing, and overall application performance, as well as increasing the number of dropped calls that users experience. Currently, many users and analysts assume that Verizon will be better able to support the network traffic that such a device generates--but just how well remains to be seen.

The Droid is the first Verizon smartphone that will support outside applications. Indeed, the number of applications available is one area where Apple is likely to maintain a significant edge over Google, at least for a while. Apple has already approved more than 100,000 applications for download from its iPhone App Store; Google is its next closest competitor, with just over 10,000 applications available in its Android Marketplace.

Analysts are skeptical that Apple will hold the lead, however, as the Droid is just the first of a wave of Android phones expected from major carriers such as Verizon Wireless. On Tuesday, research and consulting firm Gartner predicted that Google's Android platform will be more popular than the iPhone OS by 2012.

The iPhone has radically changed the smartphone game in just over two years; I can't wait to see what some solid competition does for the field.

Last fall, I wrote a review of Google's App Engine, a product designed to help developers easily host and run Web applications. I praised the service's engineering but warned that developers should be careful about getting locked in. I wrote:

No matter how quick and easy building Web applications is with App Engine, and no matter how good Google's infrastructure is, the service's lack of openness remains a serious drawback. While Google's representatives say that they want to avoid locking companies into their system, the reality is that as long as important components such as the database remain proprietary, developers will have limited flexibility...

While it's possible to get data out of App Engine and move it somewhere else, Stocky says that not all the features that would allow an application to be transferred to some other system have been built yet. In the meantime, a developer who wanted to move away from App Engine would have to find a way to deal with, for example, losing the Google database system and having to move back to one like MySQL. A developer who was taking full advantage of Google's database would have to do a lot of work to make the application function well on a different one.

Earlier this year, Google launched the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers who work on the technology needed for people to get their data into or out of Google's products. The team recently took some important steps toward opening App Engine, publishing a guide to "escaping from App Engine" and "escaping to App Engine."

"Google App Engine was a very important product to liberate, because if we're going to get you as a developer to use App Engine, it means you're going to put your users' data in our systems. We don't want to lock you and your users in," says Brian Fitzpatrick, who leads the Data Liberation Front.

This is a great first step, and I'm glad to see Google making good on its promises. This doesn't, however, remove all the concerns I expressed in the review. For instance, an app that's tailored to take advantage of Google's system would likely still suffer if it were moved. Lori Macvittie has also noted that the stored data often isn't the only thing needed to successfully move from one service to another.

That said, Fitzpatrick's team seems to be making a good faith effort. Macvittie points out that sometimes "liberated" data comes out in an inconvenient format, particularly when there isn't a real open standard. But that's more the result of immaturities in the industry than the specific failings of Google.

Fitzpatrick wants to "let our code speak for itself." I'm looking forward to seeing further developments to App Engine and other Google products. And I hope efforts like this will spur the creation of more true open standards where they're needed.