So tonight I was looking up something here on the blog and I noticed that my Friend Connect avatars looked different.  Suddenly there were random favicon’s associated with various members of my site.  It’s possible they were there all along and I was oblivious to them, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.

I did a little bit of research to see if anyone else had noticed this and at the moment it doesn’t appear so.  I did some blog searching, Google searching, even checked the Friend Connect website and Google group and came up empty handed.  What’s strange is that I don’t exactly understand why the the icons are there and what they mean.

You’ll notice in one instance there is a Twitter favicon next to real estate SEO John Jones‘ avatar.  Below him you’ll notice that David Harry and a number of other members of my site have the Google favicon.

To see what it did I tried clicking on it.  When I wasn’t logged in to Friend Connect it did nothing.  I logged in to Friend Connect and tried it again; all this did was refresh the users Friend Connect profile information.

I am at a total loss as to what these mean and why some members have them and others don’t.  Furthermore what identifies what favicon your avatar receives?  Is this even supposed to be there or is this just something Google is playing with?

Here’s another interesting thing I noticed.  I went to scope out some other blogs that I knew had Friend Connect; including David Harry’s SEO Blog, Samir Balwami’s Left the Box, James Morris’ blog and Collective Thoughts and of all of these the only favicon’s I could find were Google favicon’s.  John Jones is the only person I have found so far that has the Twitter favicon in the lower right corner of his avatar.

What’s going on Google?  Anyone have any insight?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.