Software > Social NetworkingEssentials

Spread some festive cheer this month by adding a Christmas application to your Facebook profile

OpenSocial supporters celebrated on Thursday what they consider major progress in this project to establish a common set of standard APIs and tools for developing social networking applications.

Yahoo continues to roll out its Open Strategy aimed at overhauling its platform and services by opening itself to more developers and becoming more social with the debut Thursday of a new universal user profile.

A Facebook group formed for those opposed to the site's new design is nearing 2.7 million supporters, and the leaders are organizing a two-day boycott to bring their point across.

A personal diary, the latest tech gossip, new Web sites of note, hypertext links to upcoming Apple products -- there's a blog for just about every topic under the sun, and the quality of these daily journals is all over the map.

Within two years, I believe mobile social networking will become the most valuable business application since e-mail.

A recent Google search of the popular social networking site MySpace for several variations of terms describing a person's maternal grandparents returned more than 11,000 search results.

US presidential candidate Senator John McCain, whose campaign in recent weeks has stepped up its effort to better embrace Web 2.0 tools, this week relaunched the McCainSpace social network.

Microsoft calls it TownSquare. Deloitte hosts D Street. IBM has its Beehive, and Best Buy its BlueShirt Nation.

New social network players say don't call "game over" simply because MySpace and Facebook are pulling in about 70 per cent of the Web traffic that's headed toward the top 57 social networking sites. Scrappy new players are devising engagement strategies, narrow customer focuses, and product twists to lure audiences and catch the eyes of business developers. The market is still young and up for grabs.

Social networking site Friendster has announced it has appointed former Google managing director for South East Asia Richard Kimber as its new CEO and received a further $20 million in venture funding.

The launch of Facebook's Beacon advertising system in November put the social networking site in the middle of a controversy over privacy, as Beacon was criticized for being too aggressive and stealthy in collecting and broadcasting information about users' activities online. For that reason, few people right now would probably envy the job of Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer and the person most responsible for explaining the site's policies to the public.

Frengo Wednesday announced the availability of its OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit, which expands on the capabilities of the company's mobile toolkit for Facebook. Developers can use the new tool to upgrade applications running on several social networks to support mobile devices.

Open source startup, Ringside Networks, has launched this week with the aim of persuading companies to embrace social networking by building it into their own Web sites.

A social networking site that caters to an older crowd is helping the open-source Apache Web server widen its market share lead over Microsoft's Internet Information Services software, according to market research firm Netcraft.

Six Apart, which hosts the popular Movable Type and TypePad blogging tools, Wednesday unveiled a tool it said allows Facebook users to post to multiple blogs or micro-blogs across the Web from within the social network.

A security problem with MySpace has the potential to botch up law-enforcement efforts to track bad actors on the social-networking site.