If you have a small website and you are looking to make your website more social, to obtain some of the features you find on sites like MySpace and Facebook, then Google has a code you can to put on your site called Friend Connect. To see an example of Google Friend Connect on an actual website, check out World Class Poetry.

One of the really cool features you can add to your site using the Friend Connect code is a comment feature. To see an example of the comment feature in action, visit the book reviews pages of WCP.

Google Friend Connect has other features that allow website owners an opportunity to make their sites more social. It’s free and you have to have to learn how to alter code as you do with many other free and open source solutions that can do the same thing. If anything, Friend Connect can be a temporary solution to your social needs while you look at other alternatives.

Google has announced that it will change its privacy policy. Instead of keeping IP address logs for 18 months, the search provider will keep records for 9 months.

Google and other search engines, most notably Yahoo!, have had ongoing conflicts with regulators and governments around the world. Most of those conflicts have occurred on the opposite side of the Atlantic from the U.S., mostly in Europe and Southeast Asia. Google notes on its official blog that its privacy policy is geared toward trying to balance privacy with better customer service, but EU authorities aren’t buying it.

Google has been criticized by users as well as governments concerning its privacy policy and many search users have expressed concerns over the months over what Google will use its information for. Two service purposes Google has used IP information for is to help users get better results in its personalization features and to help them better improve their search results through a service called Google Suggest.

Whether or not privacy users will be happy with the 9-month log data that Google keeps remains to be seen, but my guess is they will never be happy until Google says it will do away with keeping search records completely. And what are the chances of that happening? I’m placing my bet on it having something to do with the underworld and extreme weather conditions.

Google has decided to enter the browser wars. That’s fine. Their ubiquity will supersede them.

I don’t have a problem with Google Chrome. I haven’t even downloaded it to take it for a test drive. I probably won’t. I really don’t even have a problem with Google wanting to get in on the browser wars. It’s possible that they will beat out Microsoft IE in the long run. I think that’s what the plan is, though they will never outsmart Mozilla Firefox.

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin has said that the success of Firefox is what inspired Google Chrome. That’s cool. But that won’t necessarily equate to success for Google. Take a look:

My problem with the whole Google Chrome browser introduction is that Google seems to want to be the king of all media - but I thought that was Howard Stern? OK, pardon the digression. The point is, Google may want to own the Internet, and I think their idea for the next generation of Web browser - one that will serve as a real-time application for Web 2.0 with all kinds of cool bells and whistles - is a good idea. In fact, I think Mozilla Firefox will incorporate some of those ideas into its next upgrade version. I certainly hope so because it’s my preferred browser.

Microsoft may even try to use some of Google’s ideas in its next version of IE, but MS needs to first catch up to Mozilla before it can try to tackle Google. When it comes to Web browsers, I want something that helps me see information online better. I don’t necessarily want a browser that will sing and dance and show me some skin. One of the best ideas that Google introduces through its Web browser is the multi-application approach. The fact that each tab can run separate Web apps simultaneously without clogging my computer memory and when I close a tab all the memory required to run the app that tab opened goes away as well is a cool and useful feature. I hope Mozilla Firefox incorporates it because I really don’t want to switch browsers.