Google is updating its social networking service Friend Connect to allow Web site owners to personalize their content and online ads while also offering community-building tools.

Aimed at special-interest Web site publishers with little programming experience, Google Friend Connect's (GFC) new features provide ways for visitors to communicate with each other, create profiles and participate in polls.

For site owners, new tools include the ability to create customized newsletters, provide personalized content through inter-site links that match the visitor's interests and the addition of targeted AdSense advertisements.

"One of our missions at Google is to make the Web more social, and the core thing Google Friend Connect looks to solve is helping like-minded people communicate," Sami Shalabi, lead tech manager for GFC, told InternetNews.com. "You don't need any programming experience: You go to the service, answer a few questions, decide what kinds of social features you want to add, hit a button that generates some code, and you're done."

GFC's new tools come as the latest in the Web behemoth's ever-expanding reach into Internet-related services beyond its core search business, as Google rolls out new browser software, mobile operating systems and applications and online advertising services, among other efforts.

The free GFC update is likely to compete directly with smaller businesses that offer similar services, for instance, those that provide customized newsletter campaign management and analytics programs that help site owners tailor content and place targeted ads.

Still, the free services may be welcomed by small site owners who are looking to add social networking and targeted ads to their sites.

The GFC update is also part of Google's ongoing effort to compete with the popular social networking site Facebook, which offers Facebook Connect. To keep pace, Google has been adding features to GFC during the past 10 months, including a "recommendation gadget" that highlights the most popular content at a site, integration with Blogger, a comment translator, a "social bar" that makes it easier to add social networking components to Web sites, and now today's community-building and customization tools.

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To help visitors connect, site owners can log into the "Interests" section of their GFC account and add site-relevant questions that people can answer when joining the Web site, using a poll gadget for mini-questionnaires.

"For instance, if you have a music Web site, you might ask people to share their favorite bands, the last concert they attended, or where they discover new music," Mussie Shore, GFC's product manager, said in a Google blog post. "The details people share are added to their Friend Connect public profiles for your site, which are seen by other site visitors. This way, your visitors can learn more about each other in the context of the interests that bring them to your Web site."

Visitors may also send private messages to each other through their Friend Connect profile.

To help site owners customize content to appeal to users, the interests people share are now available in a new "community data" section of their GFC dashboard, shown in chart form. Any data collected on Friend Connect can be exported and used in any other software programs site owners may already employ to run their site.

The newly added newsletter feature enables site owners to create, send and manage newsletters that can be distributed to all subscribers or to different segments of subscribers, based on the interest responses they submit.

Google's "personalized content gadget" can be used to automatically display a dynamic, customized set of links to content on the site that matches each visitor's specific interests.

"Some sites have a lot of content, and over time it gets buried, so, for example, if you run a site about guitars and music, and you have content on finger-picking techniques, when a visitor answers questions related to these areas, content will automatically be displayed in a box at the site, based on that behavior," Shalabi said.

There's also a new way for both site owners and Google to make money that ties into Google AdSense -- the search giant's popular service for publishers to add targeted network ads to their sites. AdSense users can also add customized Google-powered search and search results ads. Depending on the type of ad, publishers get paid when users view or click on the ads displayed.

Now, AdSense users can better target ads based on their Friend Connect data.

"For those of you who display ads on your Web site, your Friend Connect account now includes an AdSense section that lets you enable Google ad units that are matched both to your site's content and to the interests users publicly share on your Web site," Shore said.

Given the metrics for GFC, the Internet behemoth stands to significantly increase the chances of garnering more AdSense money. Shalabi said that since its launch in December 2007, 9 million sites now use GFC.

More than half a billion unique visitors view GFC pages every 30 days, with two people joining a GFC site every second, Shalabi added.