social

A new service out of Italy called Koinup is aiming to be the social network of choice for denizens of virtual worlds and online games like Second Live, World of Warcraft, IMVU and others.

The idea is to give these users a single place to post and share screenshots, video--known as machinima--or personal stories from the virtual worlds.

In addition, given that it is branding itself a social-networking service, it also allows users to create lists of friends from all these different environments, and to see all the content they've posted.

It won't, however, let you automatically move … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Social-media sites are visited mainly by early technology adopters and pose thorny privacy problems but are an increasingly viable channel for news distribution for overwhelmed Internet consumers, panelists at the Emerging Technology Conference said on Wednesday.

During the opening session of the conference, founders from three popular Web 2.0 social media sites--Kevin Rose of Digg, Tariq Krim of NetVibes, and Garret Camp of StumbleUpon--predicted a growing role for community-oriented sites in the media industry. The conference, now called EmTech, is put on by the Technology Review and held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Until now I've resisted joining the scrum opining about what Facebook may or may not do with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo--or Mr. Bacciagalupe on the corner. But the numbers getting tossed around these days are so "bubblicious" that you have to wonder whether history's about to repeat.

On paper, it all makes good sense. (And doesn't it always?) In this case, Microsoft would pay a reported $300 million to $500 million for a piece of Facebook. Microsoft's PR team would undoubtedly issue a typically ain't-things-grand press release about how synergies between the two companies … Read more

PeopleJam is a place for people looking to give and receive advice on health, relationships, spirituality and finances to connect with each other.

The site launched Monday and is in open beta right now. The founders have culled more than 150 "experts"--meaning writers, motivational speakers, counselors, finance experts and more--to blog on these lifestyle topics. There are also "lifecoaches" who also contribute content, both videos and text-based.

The idea is that PeopleJam will be the destination for people who have specific questions to create a profile, find answers to questions and add their own posts … Read more

"Stop giving away content for free!" say the people behind CornerWorld.

The makers of CornerBand have created a new social network that combines all the elements of some of Web 2.0's most-visited sites--Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube--plus some others, like Evite and Ustream.

Another social network ... really? Do we need this? CornerWorld thinks it will be able to lure people from its established 30,000-strong CornerBand community--where musicians can put a price on their songs--plus others to use its platform to monetize individual photos, songs, videos that one would normally put on Facebook or MySpace or YouTube … Read more

It is fairly typical for also-rans to overpay for relevance. In other words, the runner-up in a competition is often willing to pay a hefty premium for something that it thinks will make it relevant again.

This phenomenon is on display today with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Microsoft is pushing for a $300 million - $500 million investment in Facebook (or 5%), valuing the social networking site at $10 billion. This is a clear indication that Microsoft believes that it needs Hail Mary efforts to become relevant online, and that a site that allows users to "chomp" and "poke" each other will somehow translate into insane amounts of revenue.

Good luck on both counts, Microsoft.… Read more

Social-networking pioneer Friendster might have been losing out to rivals Facebook and MySpace for some time now, but the company isn't giving up any time soon. The San Francisco-based company announced on Monday evening that its site is now available in traditional Chinese in addition to English.

This is a strategic move for Friendster, as numbers have shown that it's far from dead in the Asia-Pacific region, where 35 million of its 50 million users are based--in fact, ComScore numbers have indicated that with global growth taken into account, Friendster is growing more quickly than MySpace. Traditional Chinese, … Read more

Yet another company launching at this week's DemoFall 2007 conference is Graspr, a video-based social network for instructional content that's both professionally- and user-generated. Categories on the site will include topics as disparate as gardening, sports, crafts, and cooking.

Created by a handful of former Yahoo vice presidents, including Teresa Phillips, who serves as the new company's founder and CEO, Graspr will open to a public beta on Tuesday.

Suffice it to say that this is not a particularly open niche of the Web. eHow and Instructables currently dominate the "instructional encyclopedia" niche, and since … Read more

As I've previously discussed, my new company Ning exists to give everyone the ability to create your own social network for anything -- in less than two minutes, for free -- with the ability to customize your network any way you want.

Today we passed 100,000 social networks on Ning.

This chart shows the number of social networks on Ning since we rolled out the current version of our service earlier this year:

As you can see, 70,000 networks have been created in the last seven months alone!

What does it mean to have 100,000 social … Read more