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MyPunchBowl, the party planning service I covered in January, has added some neat new features, including publicly viewable RSVPs--one of the few things I griped about. The service has also added YouTube integration to let party goers share videos of the event.

Like competitor Evite, MyPunchBowl's new RSVP options let you see who has been invited, along with whether or not they're coming. You can also turn the visibility of the party's guest list on and off at any time, which is a nice touch if people start nagging you about wanting to see who's coming, … Read more

I would be wary to predict a mass exodus from currently popular social networks, but after playing around with Ning in the last few days, I'd say it could easily steal users from MySpace. Ning lets you create your very own social network, with custom branding, forums, photos, and videos. Everything is fully integrated and customizable with really slick looking themes that put less focus on individual user profiles, and more of an emphasis on group sharing and communication.

Compared to MySpace and Facebook, you still get to create and manage an extensive personal profile. The main difference is … Read more

eSnips, the social networking and content-hosting service, is quintupling the storage on users accounts to 5GB. The company is also adding new music-sharing features that let users create embeddable music widgets and playlists for use on eSnips user pages, blogs, Web sites, and social networking sites like MySpace. The service ties into the eSnips marketplace, which lets you buy and sell user-generated content like photos and music.

We covered eSnips last year and noted its similarity to social bookmarking site Del.icio.us mixed with content hosting like you'd find on social networking sites. Since then, eSnips claims to … Read more

In Marc Andreessen's vision of the future, MySpace is going to face stiff competition from a million mini MySpaces.

One of the cofounders of Netscape and a symbol of the technology revolution of a decade ago, Andreessen is now backing a company called Ning, which launched a set of new tools on Tuesday designed to help even the most tech-challenged person build a social-networking site.

"(Ning) is essentially MySpace version 2," Andreessen said last week, adding that he is placing a bet that social-networking sites will follow a similar development path to that of Internet service providers … Read more

Adobe Systems released a technology preview version of a "social newspaper" site called myFeedz, which sift through RSS feeds on the basis of user-defined tags. The site had been in public testing since August, but now is an official part of Adobe Labs and an comes with an official logo using Adobe's official typeface.

myFeedz begins with a standard RSS reader format but tailors the feeds according to content tags users can set. In addition, myFeedz suggests tags based on the feeds selected in users' OPML files--which for those of you who don't parse XML in … Read more

Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with Pageflakes' new CEO, Dan Cohen. Pageflakes makes a "single page aggregator" service. It's a good site to use as your home page. You can add RSS feeds, widgets, and all sorts of content to the page, and you can set up multiple tabs on your site for different categories of content. [See previous Webware coverage.]

Pageflakes' special power is its community focus. You can easily share your page layouts with other people and even let them modify your pages. Cohen sees Pageflakes as a good service for groups … Read more

Buddywave is a free Windows-only browser, based off of Internet Explorer with some MySpace functionality built in. You have access to a MySpace profile builder (which is incidentally the same one we covered in our Mashcodes post) and a messenger that lets you create groups and manage your MySpace friends more effectively. There's also the ability to instant message and a picture viewer.

I'd prefer Buddywave be an extension or toolbar, as I've gone so long using Firefox, it would literally cripple me to use a new browser--especially just for MySpace use. However, Buddywave might be the … Read more

Yesterday 37signals founder Jason Fried posted about the team's upcoming contact management app called Highrise. The goal of the app is to help you manage contact information in a better way than relying on Post-its or your current software-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Think of it like a Rolodex but with collaboration and more space to write things down. Many people can have access to the same records at once, and from the announcement, 37signals thinks they can do better than your current CRM.

In many ways Highrise is a solution for a problem with Web communication technology: … Read more

As popular social-networking and video-sharing sites continue to gain popularity, a new class of start-ups is attempting to cash in on the bonanza.

Several companies that debuted at Demo '07 showed off slick new applications that are ready-made to take advantage of the content and audiences of successful sites like YouTube, MySpace.com, Facebook and others. Web apps like Panjea, Vuvox and Share2Me enable users to re-share media content that's already been uploaded on the Net.

Though building a company based on a single feature usually is not a wise idea, VCs are all over this stuff, shelling out … Read more