Kicking the public out of a courtroom is an option that should be used rarely and extremely judiciously, which is what makes U.S. District Judge James Ware’s decision Monday disappointing.

Ware shuttered the doors to a San Jose, Calif., hearing pitting Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, probably the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, against Harvard University classmates who claim Zuckerberg stole ideas and source code from a similar venture called ConnectU. Ware took this extraordinary step without notice, without a formal request from either side, and without even specifying why it was necessary.

So what’s so special with this hearing that calls for a private status? Follow the story on CNet News.

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalogue of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Google Friend Connect is being made available to a limited number of site owners as it approaches general availability. If you are interested in participating, fill out this short form.

This Facebook “anthem” seems to sum it up

I’ve tried them all with great enthusiasm, at least to begin with. First I lost interest in MySpace as I’m probably to old to stay on a site that looks like a complete and utter mess. Lately I’ve also lost interest in Facebook and I know a lot of other people share my opinion.

Main reason is probably the add-ons which makes your page look more and more like your old MySpace page. Secondly your mail box keeps piling up with superwall, funwall, annoyingwall and other crap messages from Facebook. It’s like signing up and volunteer to receive more SPAM.

To back up my statement I had a look at recent growth trends at compete;

Twitter on the other hand is all about creative macro-blogging. It enables you to tell your friends and colleagues where you are and what you do via the web, IM or mobile, basically from anywhere, with 140 characters or less.

I’ve only just started, but I see a future. Join me if you like…

When Jack Dorsey, one of the people behind the Twitter-consept, received an award at the South by Southwest festival a year ago, he held the following speach:

We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!

I’d like to hear your opinions on this, will Facebook die over the next few years, along with MySpace (MS will probably never let that happen)? And what about twitter, will the success continue?

Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networks

Digsby is an application that merges all (most of) your on-line services into one. It currently supports the following IM clients: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. But it doesn’t stop there, it also supports the following email clients: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, POP, IMAP, AIM/AOL Mail. And if that wasn’t enough for you it also troughs a few social networks in the mix - Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to be exact.

To view exactly what to expect take a look at the features listing and/or some screen shots of Digsby in action.

Before downloading I recommend that you register. That will make the installation process even simpler. After you have downloaded the application and logged in with your new user details you can start adding IM, Email and SN accounts through “Tools -> Preferences” (will most likely pop up automatically).

Simple and intuitive, shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes (as long as you remember all your account details…).

As an added bonus I’ve found Digsby to be very gentle on the memory, and it does support video calls and all the other features found in e.g. MSN. Current version works on Apple, Windows and Linux =

If you decide to give it a try I’d love to hear your first impressions as well.