socialnetwork

An Indiana man filed a lawsuit against RockYou this week alleging that the provider of social-networking apps failed to secure its network and protect customer data, enabling a hacker to grab passwords of 32 million users earlier this month.

The suit seeking class action status was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by lawyers for Alan Claridge, of Evansville, Ind., who registered with RockYou in August 2008 to use a photo-sharing application. RockYou is a publisher and developer of online apps and services like "SuperWall" on Facebook and "Slideshow" on MySpace.

Claridge … Read more

Business news channel CNBC and professional networking site LinkedIn have formed a strategic alliance.

Under the deal announced late Wednesday, the CNBC will provide articles, blogs, financial data, and video across the LinkedIn network. The news channel also will integrate LinkedIn functionality into CNBC.com. That functionality will allow LinkedIn's members to share comments about the news within their network of friends and business contacts. In addition, the two companies will jointly create content, including community-generated content such as surveys, from LinkedIn members for broadcast.

The changes on the sites are set to launch in the fourth quarter.

"… Read more

The book's opening line is: "Helen has just registered on Facebook."

Sentence two, if it gets enough votes by Facebook users, would be: "Friends have been telling her for a long time to do this, but for some reason she had continually postponed this moment. Why? She could not answer this question exactly."

The rest is up to online wordsmiths who choose to install a community book-writing application called LiveBook, launched on Tuesday by both Facebook and the Bebo social network.

In a sort of Exquisite Corpse game for the Web 2.0 set, LiveBook, … Read more

Instead of relying solely on sales and competing with established sellers such as Wine.com or brick-and-mortar stores, where most wine is sold, entrepreneurs are building social networks aimed at wine lovers.

Read the full story at BusinessWeek: "Building a Facebook for wine"

Zude, a new Web site by Fifth Generation Systems (5g), lets you make a collage of all your favorite items from the Web and present them in one spot.

The site took down its password-only entrance and went into "soft launch" last week. In other words, it's testing the waters to see who in the public sphere will find and use it.

And I'm just not sure who that is.

Similar to Paggi.com, Zude allows you to create your own, personalized Web pages or profile page--called a "Zudescape"--with text, photos, videos, audio … Read more

The streaming music site Finetune, a likely competitor to Pandora, is now available as a Facebook application and is working smoothly.

While Finetune launched the Facebook app in September, we found a few kinks in it and, after talking with Finetune's CEO, decided to wait on sending you there until they were ironed out.

Most of the issues with posting and sharing playlists now seem to be resolved.

The application allows you to create music playlists of any artist in its database and post them to your Facebook profile. Friends can then listen to the playlists.

The Finetune Facebook … Read more

There may be an excess of social-networking sites starting up these days, but the concept seems to be a permanent fixture on the Web landscape. Whether it's MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, or your own network, people love connecting with old friends and finding new ones online.

Most social-networking occurs via Web-based software in your browser, but there are several cool downloadable tools that you can also use to connect and communicate with friends and strangers online.… Read more

As Nick Hornby once wrote, what you're like is not as important as what you like.

That philosophy seems to be spreading across the Internet as more and more opportunities for rating and sharing opinions present themselves. Now you can keep the late-night debates over pop culture going all week long.

Shelfari, a social-networking site centered on books, is like GoodReads in that you can add and rate books, post reviews and share your thoughts with friends.

The company just added a widget function that works with Facebook and other social-networking sites, so that other friends--maybe those who are … Read more