Google Friend Connect is now available in beta. With this service, you now have another way of making your site more social. Friend Connect will makes it easy for you to instantly interact with others on the sites that you frequent. With friend Connect, your site will become OpenSocial container that is capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community. The beauty of this is that it is very easy to set up, all you have to do is just paste a code in your site and you're done.

With member gadget, you can allow visitors to join your site, sign in and out, see other members, and use other social features. Just install this in your site and visitors can start joining in your site.

There are also social gadgets that will allow you to populate your Friend Connected site with as many gadgets as you'd like. There's the Wall gadget that allows viewers to post comments, or links to videos on your site. There is also the Rate and Review gadget that allows viewers to rate a page, or a section of a page. Viewers can use this to rate videos, articles, books, photos, songs, or anything else you can imagine. You can put multiple Review/Rate gadgets on one page, one for each item you want viewers to review. And there is also an available demo of the OpenSocial application that demonstrates the basic concepts that an OpenSocial developer can use in their application. Check out Google Friend Connect now, it's cool.

Yahoo has added a somewhat attractively stylish feature in its image search. If you have used Yahoo you probably are familiar with Yahoo Search Assist, which suggests search terms as you type in your query. Well, they added this feature to their image search. When you type in your image query, samples of image results with text query result will come up (see image above). I tried it with the term "van gogh" and what came up are some thumbnails of some of Van Gogh's popular paintings. I tried it with other search terms but it seemed to get muddled a bit sometimes. I guess this additional new feature would not make people shift to Yahoo as thier default search engine even if it has the potential of becoming "cool".

The holiday season is here again and Christmas parties are just a few days away. One thing that is always part of office or school Christmas parties is the exchanging of gifts. In my office we have set the Christmas party on December 18th so as early as now everyone is busy thinking up of the coolest gifts to give. Why is it not that easy to choose the best gift to give? It is because the gift you give is a reflection of who you are. I was having a hard time deciding on the kind of gift I should give to my kringgle until I stumbled upon Pexagontech.com. There I found the coolest personalized holiday gifts one could give to an office mate. What's great about this is that Pexagontech is now having a 20% off 4 these great personalized holiday gift ideas!

They have personalized thumb drives that come in 14 different colors and 32 different themes and up to 16 GB in capacity that you can buy for as low as $7.99 after discount. I had a real fun time choosing the color and theme and the custom laser engraving that would best fit the personality of the person I'd give the thumb drive to. And it's not only personalized thumb drives that they have, they also have personalized pens that come in 3 unique styles, multiple colors and a free line of personalized laser engraved text! Psst... and it is as low as $1.59 after discount.They also have wooden flash drives for the environmentally friendly kringgle. And if you mean to give your boss or administrator the perfect simple but elegant gift, you can opt for the Business Card Flash Drives that looks like a business card. Actually the back side of this card hides a small USB cable (with huge 2GB capacity) and the front side can be engraved for free with 3 lines of personalization text, for as low as $15.99.

What could be more cool than these gift ideas? Head now to Pexagontech.com and see for your self what I am talking about :)

Would you consider Hulu a threat to Youtube? It seems like every more often this online video site adds more features that enhance user experience. Yesterday it introduced two new features: a recommendation section for users with accounts, and a filter that allows you to quickly find closed captioned videos. And if you have been following Hulu's progress, you can say that there are too many times that it is ahead of Youtube in innovation. But Youtube is Youtube and Hulu is, well, Hulu. Let's keep a close watch of the two and see how they make our online video experience more and more beautiful each day.

Have you experienced sitting on Santa's lap? We'll I've tried it today. I went to the CEIVA website and had great fun time with uploading my favorite picture and seeing it with a wonderful digital frame. I chose the image I uploaded because it shows how my small family is full of love. Sometimes pictures speak more than words can describe. With CEIVA digital photo frame, the beauty of that image I uploaded was highlighted, it is really amazing! I did not realize how beautiful the picture was until it got its digital frame. I'm in love with CEIVA digital photo frame, very unique and elegant. How I wish to have it as a gift for my wife this Christmas. Well, that one of my Christmas wishes, to be a able to have such a wonderful gift for the woman I love this Christmas.

CIEVA is having a Got a Wish Sweeepstakes for the holidays. You can join this contest and get the chance of making some of your wishes come true this Christmas. There will be 29 winners in this contest who will be randomly selected from the daily entries. There would be one winner per day. Join the contest now for your chance to win $500, a good enough amount to make some of your wishes come true this holiday season. So what are you waiting for? Head now to CEIVA and experience sitting on Santa's lap.

Do you know the top ten most searched terms in Google in 2008? If you do not know, can you guess some of these most searched terms? Well, let's see if you guessed some of the terms. Google actually provided the "fastest rising search terms for 2008 (U.S.A)", here they are:

1. obama
2. facebook
3. att
4. iphone
5. youtube
6. fox news
7. palin
8. beijing 2008
9. david cook
10. surf the channel

I know that you did not guess the top term but you are now slapping you forehead and telling your self that of course it is only natural for "obama" to be the most searched term in the US in 2008. Last year the most searched term (globally) was "iphone".