Google Friend Connect is Google’s beginnings of a social infrastructure. Instead of a central location like Myspace or Facebook, Friend connect is spread to the far reaches of the net. In December, it opened to all Websites. That means that anyone with a Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID username and password can sign in on any blog or site hosting a Friend Connect widget.

Friend Connect is also open to developers with the desire to design and build apps that integrate with Friend Connect.

Today, iLike (social music discovery service) announced a “social playlist” gadget utilizing the power of Google Friend Connect.

As the leader in social music discovery, we have used Google’s Friend Connect service to build a “social playlist” gadget, which launched today. This new feature empowers any Web site owner to add a playlist to his/her site. The social hook is that visitors to a participating Web site can “log in” (via Friend Connect) to edit these dynamic playlists by adding or deleting songs.

read entire iLike announcement.

Music has been a central theme in the social sphere since day one. People tend to adopt music related services rather quickly and I don’t think this will be any different. I do hope that the “Audio Police” leave this one alone…but if the recent news about “muting” copyrighted content on YouTube is any indication of future action, can we expect similar issues when the iLike gadget appears on 1 million blogs?

update: Upon further inspection I have noticed that the music is streamed through Rhapsody and they impose a “25 play” limit on non subscribers. (not sure if this is per song or plays per widget) This cripples the reach of this widget dramatically!

Look at the sidebar bottom for the iLike “Social Playlist” gadget widget