You may or may not have yet heard about Google's Friend Connect, a service that lets visitors to a website to invite/see/interact with their friends from other social networks.

Friend Connect provides a simple, effective, and fairly universal way of adding social networking features to a web site. Although Friend Connect is still in private beta, mapdango is one of the lucky sites that now includes Friend Connect functionality (it took a little cajoling) :)

What can you do with Friend Connect on mapdango?
For starters, anyone that visits the front page of mapdango can add a review of the site. We welcome any feedback you may have. This is a great way of letting your friends know that you have visited the site.

But there's more! Anytime you explore a location with mapdango, you can now add comments, photos, and videos to share with others that visit that location. Because each search result page for mapdango is a different URL, this means that you can add location-specific information for others to see whenever they visit that location.

And even more! Because mapdango accepts searches for everything from country names to zip codes, you can add information at a variety of geographic scales. Want to comment on the state of Virginia? You can. Want to go 'hyperlocal' and add information specific to zip code 97209? You can.

Go ahead, check it out, and let us know what you think!

A great many thanks to the Google folks for the opportunity to participate in preview release of Friend Connect. It's exciting to say the least.