Classes - Greater than less than operators

HI Guys,
I was just wondering how to make the greater than less than operators <> a friend on my class?

I've allready made the extraction operators ie << >> for cin and cout.
friend ostream& operator<<(ostream& out, date& tempDate);
etc.

do I have to have something like

friend std:: operator<( ostream& in,& tempDate);

I'm comparing an input from the keyboard with another value.

I know that << and >> are part of the ostream library what are the < and > operators from.

Any help greatly appreciated.
regards
Brendan

class x
{
friend bool operator< (const x&, const x&);
};

This is only necessary if the non-member operator< requires access to private/protected members, though. If you can use some getvalue() member function to get the values you need for comparison, that may be preferrable.