networking

News aggregation community Digg has announced a number of new features designed to take the site's social networking beyond simply "digging" and "burying" headlines and blog entries.

Starting Wednesday night, members of the site can further customize their account profiles so that they more closely resemble something on a social-networking site--more personal information, bigger photos, and a more extensive record of site activity. They will also be able to use their friends lists as content filters so that their "social news" comes from a select group rather than the Digg community as a … Read more

Of all the days to relaunch its Digg clone, Netscape has funny timing. Propeller, the new face and name of the otherwise identical social news service, went live today. As we wrote about earlier this month, Netscape.com now redirects you to the cobranded AOL/Netscape start page that serves up a regular assortment of news stories and links, along with plugs for Propeller. Netscape.com and AOL.com users also get a new box with five of the most popular stories on Propeller.

The news comes the same day as a huge overhaul to Digg's user profile system. … Read more

Tim posted below on this blog about the new generation of social-networking sites and whether they can attract another round of users. (What are we on now, the third generation since Friendster launched in 2002? These things have almost as short generational cycles as fruit flies!)

As he rightly points out, there are many incentives but also challenges to bringing out a social network at this point in time. It's similar in some ways to the challenges faced by serialized TV shows that came in the wave after 24 and Lost.

Serialized shows where a story arc crosses over … Read more

Correction: this story has been corrected to remove the implication that iTunes sells audio files in formats other than AAC. iTunes did begin selling DRM-free songs earlier this year, but those files are still in the AAC format. Other stores are selling DRM-less MP3s, but not iTunes.

In 1998, the European Commission began investigating Microsoft on grounds that it was illegally using its desktop operating system (OS) monopoly to squeeze into new markets. At some point along the way, RealNetworks complained that Microsoft was repeating its kill-Netscape tactic by bundling the Windows Media player into Windows. In 2004, the EC agreed, … Read more

It's September, so it's time for Internet security companies to release their annual reports and surveys about the threats seen in the first six months of the year. The reports from IBM, Arbor Networks (free registration required), and Symantec (in PDF) each looked at different areas of the Internet in specific but generally found that botnets are on the rise, and that the tools used for attack have gone professional with less noise from mere amateurs. Two of the reports went to find the top three vendors most affected by newly disclosed vulnerabilities were Microsoft, Apple and Oracle, … Read more

So your MySpace.com profile says you got a dog named Fido.

Next thing you know, here come the doggie ads--Bones for Bowser, Flea dip designed for Flopper, and the Ultimate Pooper-Scooper.

Executives at Fox Interactive Media, which oversee MySpace for owner News Corp., apparently are hot to trot on this trail and will be on the talk tour this week to discuss the results of their personal profile-advertising matching program, according to a report in The New York Times.

So, what this means for you and Fido is you'll have another name of a flea dip vendor for … Read more

Mash, Yahoo's way of quietly saying farewell to Yahoo 360, is at first glance a somewhat uninspired attempt to catch up with Facebook. Even the name is boring--Mash. Don't mix it up, by the way, with Mosh, Nokia's mobile networking site (currently in beta) and Mashable, the social-networking blog. Mash (invite-only as of now) looks like a cross between Facebook, MySpace and Netvibes--and it also has a bit of wiki DNA: Anyone you grant permissions to can edit your profile or add modules they think are relevant to your profile. Besides that, nothing new.

To be … Read more

Remember when you were in junior high and the ultimate way to express yourself was to line the walls of your locker with photos and notes from friends and magazine clippings of every variety? Well, here's the digital-age version. Web page creation veteran Freewebs (more coverage here) has just launched a new site, Pagii (rhymes with "cagey"), which it's calling a "social publishing network." It's a drag-and-drop service that allows you to put photos, text, shapes, videos, and external widgets into a free-form, JavaScript-based page. The end result is something that's essentially … Read more

We reported on Thursday that MTV Networks was close to announcing plans for a new social network; later that night, Fortune unveiled more details of the project. This is a new Viacom (MTV Networks parent company) endeavor called Flux, which is growing out of what once was Tagworld. Rather than being a "destination" social network, Flux is a distributed platform of social-media features that will be installed on select Viacom niche sites (like the Subterranean Blog, which we pointed out in our original post). It's powered by Social Project, the company formerly known as Tagworld, which Viacom … Read more