Google+ expands sign-in tool to thousands more sites (will anyone care?)

Google has announced a new partnership with two companies that provide social sign-in tools to a wide range of major websites and apps, including Nike, NPR and Fox. The move will see Google+ become a common registration tool alongside Facebook Connect and Twitter, and might even inject some life into the search giant’s forlorn social network.

In a Tuesday blog post, Google announced that infrastructure platforms Janrain and Gigya will start including Google+ in their product suites; the tools provide a way for publishers to let visitors log-in through existing social media passwords rather than creating a new account from scratch. The news comes a month after the company rolled out the Google+ log-in tool with a handful of partners, including The Fancy and Open Table.

Seth Sternberg, who is the director of product management at Google+, said in a phone interview that the log-in option provides Google+ users with a secure way to log-in to websites without having to worry that the sign-on will lead to over-sharing and spamming friends on the social network (this has been a problem for Facebook in the past). Sternberg also touted the log-in tool as a way for publishers to garner data about Google+ users and to take advantage of the “over-the-air” app feature for Android — a tool that allows publishers to ask visitors to beam their app directly to a mobile device.

The widespread availability of Google+ as a log-in may prove convient for some users, but it also raises questions about Google’s overall strategic goal for its social network, which is widely derided as a ghost town (the characterization is fair — I visited for the first time in a while yesterday and discovered none of my friends had posted there in months).

Increasingly, it’s coming to seem as if Google has accepted the fact that Google+ will never become a popular social network in its own right, and is instead treating it as a piece of backend infrastructure for its other properties — search, YouTube and so on. In the meantime, tools like the log-in function will serve to drain at least some data and users away from rivals Facebook and Twitter.