By Yinka Adegoke and Eric Auchard

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Comcast Corp has agreed to acquire pioneering Web start-up Plaxo Inc, which was first to seek to turn address books into social networks and laid the foundation for Friendster and Facebook.

Terms were not disclosed. But a source close to the deal said Comcast, the top U.S. cable TV company and No. 2 broadband Internet supplier, is paying from $145 million to $175 million, based on meeting performance targets in the next few years.

Mar 13, 2008

NEW YORK (AP) — AOL said Thursday it will pay $850 million to acquire the online hangout Bebo, giving the struggling Internet company a foothold in an expanding business.

Bebo is one of the largest social networks in Britain, is ranked No. 1 in Ireland and New Zealand and has a global membership of more than 40 million, according to AOL. In the United States, however, it ranks third behind MySpace and Facebook.

Ron Grant, AOL's president and chief operating officer, said the deal should help AOL expand internationally and Bebo grow in the United States. The all-cash deal, expected to close in a month, also should give AOL an engaged audience from which it can generate additional advertising revenue.

Like millions of others, Anne Kresie comes home, drops her keys and sits down at the computer to check her Facebook account.

Her inbox is full of everything from college event notifications and updates from friends to invitations to vampire-slaying games.

But one thing she won’t find is a message from her older sister, Emily Harrington, who comes home to check on her MySpace page.

“In all honesty, most of my friends use MySpace, so it is just more convenient. Facebook just seems to be more geared towards college students, and I didn’t use these Web sites until after I had graduated,” Harrington said.

Exactly the reasons her sister prefers using Facebook to keep in touch.

“Facebook allowed me to bridge the gap between high school and college, allowing me to keep in contact with old friends,” Kresie said. “In addition, it’s a great communication tool. I’ve been able to use it to create a group specifically for a class project so that the group members can communicate progress to each other.”

The Kansas City area sisters aren’t the only ones disagreeing over social networking choices.

First popularized by industry giant MySpace, social networking has become an Internet-age global phenomenon attracting millions of users and garnering substantial revenue for advertisers seeking to direct their messages to targeted audiences based partly on age, location and hobbies.

For now, MySpace continues to dominate this young industry, but the competition is growing more intense from Facebook. Other competitors, such as AOL, don’t appear to be going away, either. In response, MySpace on Thursday unveiled a package of online music services aimed at regaining market share and challenging Apple’s iTunes

Why the buzz behind this business? Consider social networking sites as launching pads that allow people all over the world to connect with each other. That helps explain why research firm eMarketer is pegging ad spending on social networking sites to jump to $2.7 billion by 2011.

By Kathryn Small
7 April 2008 10:37AM
Tags: barcamp | sydney | uni | web | social | networks

Social networks, web 3.0 and e-business were the key topics at this weekend’s BarCamp.
 
Over 200 people attended the “freeform” conference, where the audience is invited to give speeches on the topics of their choosing.

Social networking was a recurring theme in the weekend talks. Entrepreneur Elias Bizannes criticised businesses for failing to understand the importance of social networks.

 

April 6, 2008 — 06:42 PM PDT — by Stan Schroeder —

We’ve all seen the usual success story: a 20-something programmer gets an idea, launches a website, and within months he’s already got huge traffic, multi-million dollar exit options and an interview with Wired. All the traffic graphs go straight up without faltering even for a day.

These types of stories have created an atmosphere in which not growing - even for a short period - is considered death. But is it always so? What about all those services that were welcomed with mild enthusiasm or even complete indifference, sinking slowly into oblivion, their traffic graph falling day after day, only to suddenly start rising again? Because, you know, there is such a thing as recovery in the world of web 2.0. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen; sometimes the catalyst is a new feature or option; sometimes the service was simply waiting to be discovered; and sometimes there’s no good reason at all; the tipping point appears out of nowhere.

A word of caution: don’t take the title of this article literally. The five cases I’ve described below are all very different and these companies were never really “dead.” They all share a same basic trait, though: their future looked grim at one point, but they managed to bounce back and continue growing.

1. Pluck [Alexa, Compete]

Pluck was acquired by Demand Media. What do you think, based on the traffic graph above, when did the sale occur? Somewhere around January 2006? Wrong. Pluck was doing quite nice as an RSS reader back in the day, but its popularity stalled in 2006, and at the end of that year they completely ditched the RSS reader idea. But, they were acquired by Demand Media for no less than $75 million dollars in March 2008! What happened? Pluck completely changed their product, focus, and business strategy: they went with a white label social networking solution, and it paid off bigtime in the end. A lesson to learn: changing everything and starting from scratch can sometimes be a good thing.

 

April 09, 2008: 08:05 PM EST

Apr. 10, 2008 (Investor's Business Daily delivered by Newstex) --

Social networking Web sites have become hugely popular, but whether such businesses can generate big money is still unknown.

MySpace.com, Facebook, Bebo and other sites have been earmarked as key locales to place ads because of the growing millions of people who use the sites to share messages, swap photos and otherwise be "social" with other users.

But Google (GOOG) and others are finding that millions of users don't mean much if those users ignore the ads, says Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer.

Founded in 2004 as a mobile marketing company, Los Angeles-based Juice Wireless shifted gears in 2006 to launch JuiceCaster, a “mobile social broadcasting” service and platform that enables users to share video, photos, messages and other content and communications across both PC and mobile screens, and probably by next year, TV screens as well. Named the Most Innovative Consumer Entertainment Service of 2007 by Mobility World Congress, JuiceCaster allows users to capture content via camera phone and, with a single click, share it with friends across the Juice community – and to simultaneously post the content on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Xanga and other social network personal pages. JuiceCaster is available as a desktop application, a Facebook or MySpace application, a Web app or mobile WAP application, or as a native mobile phone app running in Java 2ME, Brew, iPhone, Symbian or Windows Mobile operating environments. In the mobile market, JuiceCaster offers feature-rich downloads through selected carrier decks and offers WAP services off-deck.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - April 15, 2008) - ad:tech 
SeeSaw Networks, a digital out-of-home media company offering the most extensive digital out-of-home media network, and LocaModa, a technology company providing a mobile social platform that connects consumers' favorite online and out-of-home locations, have joined forces. The partnership leverages SeeSaw's extensive network and LocaModa's platform to provide advertisers with new ways to engage people using digital out-of-home media, the Web and mobile phones. This combination allows patrons to use their mobile phone to interact with a digital screen in a place like a bar or coffee shop and have those interactions posted to social networking sites like Facebook.

Now people in social places like bars or restaurants can connect with others in the venue as well as their online friends by engaging with interactive digital signs. Friends with access to the Web will be able to virtually join their friends in a bar without leaving their homes, see what's going on in their favorite hang-out, and participate in conversations through social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

 

Mary Jane Irwin 04.16.08, 10:00 AM ET



Burlingame, Calif. -

Segway has rolled into the Web 2.0 age, launching a social network dedicated to enthusiasts of the quirky, environment-friendly two-wheeled scooter "and anyone interested in joining the worldwide Segway movement," the company says.

The Social Segway site debuted Monday, and allows users to create profiles and discussion groups, share photos and even calculate the amount of carbon dioxide emissions they are sparing the atmosphere by riding a Segway.

"It was clear that the Segway community wanted and needed this tool," said Carol Valianti, vice president of global communications at Segway, in a statement. "Our goal is to foster growth and communications in an already exuberant and growing fan community."