The current explosion of social networking will soon result in most websites having a social networking component. As a result the big step in social networking isn’t going to be who creates the next MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube, but who creates a website or software to consolidate all the data that all these networks produce.
The world’s top cellphone maker, Nokia, has agreed to buy social networking start-up Plazes as part of its major push into offering Internet services. Plazes provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record and share their social activities. Nokia did not disclose the value of the deal.
The popular news aggregator Reddit has gone open source. The Reddit source code is available now and is written largely in Python. The Reddit development site is available at http://code.reddit.com. Here you can download the code, participate in the forum, and help maintain the documentation wiki.
There is a Web of projection that recently built up around the public debut of Facebook, Silicon Valley’s hottest Internet company. Although, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder denied this in an interview with CBS’s 60 minutes, but,that hasn’t stopped bloggers and investors from interpreting Facebook’s every move as preparation for an eventual public offering.
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Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites. The new tool is going to compete with data portability crowd like Facebook Connect from Facebook or Data Availability from MySpace.