A story I neglected to note last week was Google's attempt to make websites more sociable with its Friend Connect feature.

Fortunately, over at The Media Manager, Kirk LaPointe has had his eye on the bouncing Google ball.

He noted the battle this could trigger over who owns personal data (users or the the social network service) and Facebook's attempt to lower the temperature, saying that while Google is a good company, it didn't consult Facebook first -- which is why Facebook blocked access to the feature.

Kirk also noted that Google Earth now has a local news aggregation feature and that a Business Week article quotes an analyst as saying that Google is killing the revenue streams for journalism, capturing the lion's share while not paying one nickel towards content creation.