Two days ago I discussed two social networking applications that will allow local business sites the ability to add social networking abilities to their websites. Well, there’s been a change in one of them.

Facebook has told Google that it won’t participate in the Google FriendConnect application because Google won’t promise to protect the privacy of Facebook users. That’s a big deal to Facebook and I commend them for their stand on this.

What this means for local business site owners is you’ll now have two equally viable choices for building community into your local business website. But which choice you make will depend on what you value more - privacy for your users or flexibility. Facebook Connect will allow your users the ability to network with other Facebook users and the local Groups feature will be an excellent addition to any local site, but you won’t be able to network too well outside of Facebook and your local community. On the other hand, Google FriendConnect will allow your website users to network with people on various other social sites, Facebook excluded, and there will be no guarantee of privacy.

This isn’t to say that either of these tools will be better than any other. It’s that you’ll have to decide which one is right for you - and for your website users.

Online marketing is getting better and better every day. From time to time, I like to find and highlight tools for small business owners that can help them in their marketing efforts. Today, I’ve got a great tool for business owners that want to improve their online marketing. This tool is a great tool to help you do better competitive research and help you find your niche.

The tool I want to introduce you to is Myriad Search. This is what we call a meta search engine. A meta search engine takes information from more than one source. Other popular meta search engines include Dogpile and AOL Search.

The best way to use this tool is to type in a search term that you want your website to rank for. By doing that, you’ll find out which websites already rank in each of the top four search engines for that key search term. A ranking algorithm creates an authority ranking for each of those sites and by using this tool you can see what the competitive landscape is for the key search terms that you want to capture. I don’t know of any other tool that does this.

I recommend setting it so that you can see the top 50 sites at each search engine. You can also filter out duplicates if you need to because some of the search engines will include the same website more than once for a single search term. Google already has a filter that eliminates websites from being ranked more than once for the same search term. Ask.com, however, does not.

After looking to who is ranked at which search engines for you key terms and seeing who has authority in your niche, send the file to CSV so you can manipulate it and use it more easily. Then visit each of these websites, the ones that are most likely to be your major competitors, and see what they are doing that you can be doing. Include Myriad Search into your online competitive analysis and your online marketing will improve.