With Friend Connect, MySpaceID will be driven to a "long tail" of smaller Web sites that adopt the Google program to add social networking features to their sites, Engel said.

Engel points out that MySpace is prioritizing the use of open standards in its effort, such as the OpenID framework for single sign-on, the OAuth protocol for authentication and OpenSocial, which Google spun off into an industry initiative led by a non-profit foundation.

Developers who have already done work with MySpaceID, which was announced in May, will not have to rewrite code to take advantage of the new features coming to it.

Participating in MySpaceID is an option to members of the social networking site. Those who opt in can manage the various MySpaceID capabilities from a central console in their account.