More than a year ago Google and Facebook started a head-to-head race to build a social layer across the web with Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. The vision was — if you visited a web site, you’d get a custom experience based on your own interests and what your friends have been doing.Today that’s becoming a bit more of a reality.Google is releasing a series of widgets for its Friend Connect-enabled sites to give them personalized content, custom e-mail newsletters and advertisements. That’s a leg-up on rival Facebook, which offers widgets to find other Facebook fans and log-in credentials so you don’t have to come up with a new ID and password.They’ve also built features so that strangers with similar interests on the same Web site can find and interact with one another. Publishers can add the functionality with a snippet of code. When readers visit their site, a publisher can give them a custom survey to learn about their interests and the user demographic they’re hitting. (This also helps Google offer more relevant content in its widgets.)Right now, the data Google learns about through the Friend Connect polls and customized content links don’t feed into its other recent social products like social search, although it’s certainly a possibility for the future. Google has been pushing more social offerings as of late, launching an experimental search feature last month that shows results from friends.“Our view of social isn’t that it’s a single thing — it’s a capability that’s symbolic of people engaging with one another,” said product manager Mussie Shore. “And in that process, there are several flows that can be helpful. It’s a quality of design rather than a specific thing to do in one destination.”