Steve Rubel, technologist at Edelman PR and blogger, always surprises me. Rather than making sweeping predictions for 2009, he uses Google Insights for Search to discuss trends we move into the new year. Probably not too surprising was that 2008 Google searches for the term “social networks” was up 178% over 2007. The data certainly illustrates that consumers have greater interest in social networks. But, Google searches for keywords like “hide friends” or “hide comments” were down from 2007. Steve concludes that this is due to consumers “becoming more comfortable living on social networks.”