At the Reuters Media Summit today Fox Interactive Media President Peter Levinsohn said that Fox is planning some additions to MySpace in the next few weeks aimed squarely at Facebook. One of the most compelling, is the site's plan to let users create more than one profile to keep their contacts separate -- for example, friends, family, and business. The additional profiles will let you "express yourself in all those different segments," said Levinsohn.Though Levinsohn tempered his remarks by indicating that he thinks there exists space for more than one social network (he even admitted to having a Facebook profile, saying, "Facebook I use more to communicate with people at work... Frankly I find MySpace substantially more entertaining."), it appears as though MySpace may be after the business social networking crowd -- in spite of Levinsohn's comments about using Facebook more at work.MySpace parent company New Corp. has recently been rumored to be interested in acquiring LinkedIn, but as we've written, business networking is still a relatively untapped market. One of the main reasons people cite for not utilizing mainstream social networks like Facebook for professional networking is that there is no way to group contacts -- you can't easily keep your business profile separate from your personal profile, and no one wants their boss snooping at their vacation photos (we've all heard the tales of employees busted for goofing off on Facebookor being fired for naughty photos on MySpace).By allowing users to segment their profiles -- especially if they could be controlled from a single access point -- MySpace would take a step toward becoming a viable platform for more serious networking. Further, college-aged MySpace users would likely be happy to be able to share their lives with their families without having to share the party photos they want only their friends to see.Of course, what makes any social network tick is users, and I'm skeptical that anyone would ever use MySpace for serious business networking (anyone other than a musical act, that is). As Bernard Lunn said last month, LinkedIn is already looking "like a winner." It's hard for me to believe that the frenetic, media-oriented experience of MySpace would ever translate well for business networking. If competition for LinkedIn, Xing, Plaxo, etc. is going to materialize from the mainstream social networks, I think Facebook is probably the best candidate given their cleaner, more professional look (application clutter notwithstanding).That said, there is certainly the possibility that my speculation is off and that MySpace is not looking to move in that direction, and is making these changes purely for their current audience to be able to keep party photos away from mom. Or, that News Corporation really is interested in buying LinkedIn as a backdoor way into the business networking space and this development is unrelated to that space. Another interpretation is that MySpace is trying to capitalize on Facebook's recent privacy woesby giving their users at least the illusion of more control over who sees their profiles.

  While real TVin the US struggles over how much of a cut traditional, professional content writers ought to get from online and new media revenue - the venerable TVGuide announced today the winners of its inaugural Online Video Awards. The funniest video online according to the judges there? SNL's Dick in a Box. Originally aired in December 2006, the video is apparently believed to be funnier than any of the countless shorts posted online over the last 11 months. It is very funny.The awards were based on 1.75 million votes, and the judgment of TVGuide editors. Awards were given in 18 categories, from Funniest Web Video (D.in a B.) to Best Original Web Drama Series ("Sanctuary"). The full list is available in the press releaseand the videos can be viewed through a pageload-heavy viewer on the TVGuide site. TVGuide uses the full text of the name Dick in a Box throughout the site and press release, but serves up a censored version of the actual video itself.How is Old Media Adjusting?There doesn't appear to be a wide variety of sources from which nominees were selected. The vast majority of the nominees come from big, traditional media or other major establishment players online. The headline winners were all mainstream TV hits already. That isn't without exception, and perhaps I'm just bitter about the fact that CBS's Clark and Michaelbeat out the creative genius of Chad Vader. So far, at least, I haven't found Clark and Michael funny at all.EpicFu: This Episode With 2 Million+ YouTube Views - but No TVGuide LoveFunnyOrDie.com, Will Ferrel's site backed by GooTube investors Sequoia Capital, was named the best comedy site. Most people I've talked to say that entire site has been a vastly overpriced, one-hit wonder.Online video reporter Liz Gannes puts it more plainlywhen she writes that "there’s not a little guy in sight." Gannes points out the more independent minded online video awards at the forthcoming Winnies.It would be reactionary, of course, to say that all made-for-TV TV is bad TV and TV made for the web is good TV. There are plenty of quality cross-overs, but the TVGuide awards seem to overstate the case and be short on discovery of new content in the new medium.Truth be told, there's a whole world of new online video sources and pundits out there. TVGuide has a huge brand and is obviously driving some traffic online already - but I'll take Digg videoand Stumble Upon Videoinstead any day.TVGuide, you're going to have to do better than this.

  The New York Timesis reporting that ABC News and Facebookhave formed a partnership that will bring ABC political coverage to Facebook while lending social networking cred to the old media network. Part of the alliance has Facebook signing on as a sponsor of the ABC Democratic presidential debate on January 5th, 2008 in New Hampshire -- just days before that state's primary election and after the Iowa caucuses.Both ABC and Facebook are late to the party. CNN and YouTube were the first told hold a new-meets-old media mashup debate(the Republican version will be held this week), and MySpace teamed with MTV for their ongoing candidate dialogues.New media technologies are taking a bigger role in US election politics than they ever have, with candidates blogging, posting videos, using social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twittering. A stop at the Googleplex for an interview with Eric Schmidt has become an almost required campaign event this election cycle, and even web tech-focused blogs like TechCrunch are getting in on the act by interviewing US presidential candidates (today they talked with Barack Obama).However, even as we're seeing an unprecedented use of web 2.0 technologies in campaign politics, it's unclear how much of it is making a difference. CNet's Caroline McCarthy is skeptical. She notes that while the Facebook group "One Million Strong for Barack Obama" has 164,000 members, a parody group for television personality and author Stephen Colbert has over 1.5 million -- and crossed the million mark in just over a week. And though the New York Times and Washington Post both have Facebook applications, the most popular remain fun time wasters dealing with music, movies, games, and annoying your friends, not serious apps that deliver news.For all the hype surrounding social networks, and even all the apparent buzz candidates can build on them, it is dubious whether there will be an actual benefit at the polls.This is something we have noticed as well. In August, we wrote thatthough the Internet has provided a cost-effective way for candidates to get their message out, and has given a platform for long-shot candidates like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul that has allowed them to stay in the race, the numbers seem to indicate that Internet celebrity does not necessarily translate to the polls (though, with no ballots cast, we'll have to wait to see if that holds up).The ABC Facebook pageactually has a chart confirming some of these discrepancies by comparing support from the candidates' official Facebook pages to the results of a recent ABC News poll of likely voters. For both parties, the polled front-runner nationally is not the leader on Facebook (for Republicans the data is more out of sync than for Democrats). As a commenter surmised on our Web 2.0 Election post, this may have something to do with the international nature of social networks versus the domestically targeted nature of the presidential opinion polls.Further, the most recently completed ABC News/Facebook political poll (asking What is "the number one issue [you] look at when evaluating Presidential candidates") drew just over 1,000 votes. With over 17 million users in the US over voting age (according to Facebook's ad targeting tool), 1,000 participants in an open poll is a microscopic number. To echo Caroline McCarthy, maybe ABC News can pull it off, but I'm incredulous.What do you think? Can social networks really make an impact with political campaigns? Are ABC and Facebook too late to the party?

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Blue_Beanies_Pop_Up_Around_the_Web_Today_in_Support_of_Standards';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Today has been declared Blue Beanie Day, an only slightly tongue-in-cheek day for supporters of web standards to show their solidarity with the cause. Originatingin the mind of Douglas Vos, founder of Facebook’s Designing With Web Standards Group, the day uses a blue hat as its symbol in honor of Jeffrey Zeldman, author of the landmark book Designing with Web Standards. Zeldman wears a blue beanie on the book's cover.You might see blue hats on the heads of your friends' Twitteravatars, if you work in an office perhaps someone there is geeky enough to be wearing a blue beanie (maybe you should ask them about it - or perhaps it's you!) and there's a Flickr group dedicated to blue beanie photos(the most recent 20 of which are playing on the right, followed by a nice video of Jeffrey Zeldman).Web standards are something we write about a lot here at ReadWriteWeb. We've gotten great feedback on posts about new standards like OpenIDand OAuth. Most people, though, think of the W3C standards for CSS and HTML when the phrase is used. Belgian web design rock star Veerle Pieters has a good post todayexplaining her personal relationship to web standards and Blue Beanie day.There are new standards being developed all the time. Old and new standards work together. That's the theory anyway, I'd like to see some informed discussion on Blue Beanie Day about the Google-led OpenSocial. To what degree does it build on and to what degree does it seek to replace existing standards?Why Are Standards Interesting?Whether it's a new or old standard, the idea is the same: standardization creates a playing field that supports innovation by making scalability possible. Standardization makes life easier for users and for developers, enabling a higher level of abstraction because a common foundation has been established and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel with every new website. Standards are also important for web pages to be usable in other formats, so it's important for both accessibility and mobile. That's how I explain it, how do you?If this is a topic of interest to you, check out the new site at DataPortability.org. It's an early gathering of thought leaders concerning standards for data portability.

  So-called "Black Friday," the day after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, is the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season, and this year online retailers saw traffic surge with shoppers spending over 4/5ths of a billion dollars on Thursday and Friday alone. According to comScore, shoppers plunked down $272 million online on Thursday, and $531 million on Friday -- an increase of 29% and 22%, respectively, over the same days last year.IDG reportsthat price comparison sites also claimed a huge increase in traffic over the 2006 holiday shopping kick-off. PriceGrabber saw referral traffic up a reported 47%, while Shopping.com watched its referrals increase 61%.One thing that seemingly hasn't changed: the hottest product. The Nintendo Wii continued to see torrid sales and dominated searches at online retailers, and video games as a category saw sales leap 134% this year. Microsoft's new line of Zune media players placed second among holiday shoppers at PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, and eBay (based on searches for consumer electronics Thursday and Friday).Online retailers can only expect today to be even busier. What started as a marketing gimmick a few years ago, "Cyber Monday," in which online retailers give additional discounts to shoppers (many of whom are connecting to the Internet from work for the first time following a long weekend in the US), appears to have gained industry-wide acceptance. Shop.org, an electronic retail trade group, reports that72.2% of online retailers will participate in Cyber Monday. That is a significant increase over the 42.7% who participated just two years ago. Some retailers, such as Wal-Mart, plan to offer online deals all week, skipping the Monday tradition altogether.72 million consumers plan to shop online today, according to BIGresearch, and comScore predicts revenues of over $700 million, which could be the start of an online shopping season some see reaching $30 billion this year.Will you shop online this year? Have you taken advantage of any online deals yet today? Did you shop online on Friday?

  When it's time to do some document creation, there are many reasons to look beyond Microsoft Office. Most of the software available outside of what Microsoft offers, though, can fall short of expectations. One service worth looking into is Zoho. Today, this increasingly popular online office suite implemented full offline functionality for the first of its many different services. (Disclosure: In case you hadn't noticed in the right hand corner of our site, Zoho is an RWW sponsor.) Zoho Writer, the company's word processing tool, can now be used offline, using Google Gears. If you're someone who has grown dependent on the online functionality of Zoho, Google Docs or an other service - you'll find that it's very exciting to be able to go offline with Gears. It couldn't be easier for the user. If you've got Google Gears on your computer, you can download selected Zoho documents to your hard drive with just a click. The pages for those documents will then be accessible inside your browser, even with when you are not connected to the internet. Someday soon, the company says, the other Zoho apps will also be available offline as well. If you've tried Google Docs, you've probably noticed that it's ugly and awkward. Zoho is far less so, and now offers the advantage of being able to go offline as well. (Your collaboration partner probably trusts Google already, though, so it's not a clear case by any means.)Richard MacManus covered the read-only implementationof Gears by Zoho here in August.Whether all the bugs have been worked out of the implementation remains to be seen. Other applications leveraging Gears sometimes experience problems when trying to sync back up online after a session offline. I'd suggest you test out Zoho Offline with a back-up copy of any important documents, and perhaps save revisions in a text editor, the first few times you use it.While early Web 2.0 hype was all about doing everything online, subsequent developments have shown that the desktop has plenty to offer still. Rich Internet Apps, capable of working on the desktop but leveraging the web, offer the best of both worlds. Gears is a variation on the RIA theme and has a whole lot of promise.Google Gears was built to allow offline use of Google Reader and GMail but can be used by developers of any online service. With the new GearsMonkey Greasemonkey script, Firefox users can take any website's pages offline. Note that while Zoho Writer went offline today, Google Docs and Spreadsheets still does not offer official Gears support for offline use. There is a certain irony to that.

  This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Economic_Idiocy_of_Blocking_Social_Media_Traffic';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';By now most of you have probably seen the site 'Why Digg is Blocked'. For those that haven'tcome across it, the site is on a mission to convince webmasters andcontent producers to reject social media traffic. Here's a look at theincredibly flawed logic the site uses to justify its purpose.1. The Ad-Block Plus ArgumentThe first argument that the site makes is that social media sitesendorse the use of ad-blocking software which allegedly infringes onthe rights of site-owners.This argument is flawed for several reasons.First, none of these sites endorses the use of ad-blocking software.Yes, there was a time when Diggused to be technology-centric and a majorityof its user-base was tech-savvy enough to use ad-blocking software toimprove their online experience. However, as the site has grown, andas social media sites in general (i.e. Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUponand so on) continued to grow anddevelop a more mainstream acceptance, the demographic has expanded tothe point where it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that a majority ofthe traffic from the sites is not actively blocking advertisements.Without any hard numbers, I would guess that the ratio of ad-blockingto non-ad-blocking users from these sites follows the 80-20 rule. The20% of users that are actively engaged in finding, submitting,commenting on, and promoting the content to these site's 'popular'pages probably have ad-blocking software installed, whereas the 80%that are simply browsing these sites for interesting content to read(or reading front-page news via RSS), have no such software enabled.2. The Insignificance ArgumentThis argument really does more to hurt the author's case than any ofthe other ones (though I'm not saying the others are any less stupid).The author argues that the social media demographic is aninsignificant percentage of the internet and an even smallerpercentage in terms of online spending, so blocking them shouldn'tmatter to site-owners. But then the author goes on to argue that "users whodon't click on these ads are stealing bandwidth without paying forit". Well, if the demographic is so insignificant, why block them atall? It's not as if you're losing much in the way of ad impressions orclicks, right?Furthermore, as you will see in the next section, this 'insignificant'traffic is what actually helps put most unknown sites on the map andhelps them develop any significant kind of Google traffic to beginwith. Oh, and how much bandwidth are these users really stealing? Atmy old blog, i got dugg 7 times in a month and got250,000+ visitorsthat month, while the entire bandwidth cost was just $20.00 (Media Temple+ WP-Cache). So no matter how small the scale onwhich you're operating, as long as you're smart about your operation,social media traffic should be a godsend, not something to complainabout.3. The Low Click Through Rate ArgumentThe final argument the site employs is that according to asitepoint.com survey, Digg users are 3 times less likely to click on anadvertisement. What this site and Sitepoint both fail to factor in,is that even in the best case scenario (for search) Digg trafficusually comes in numbers 80-90 times more than Googletraffic to the same content. Once youconsider those numbers, even at 1/3 the CTR, the total number ofclicks you get are still 30 times as many as you would get from Googletraffic.Furthermore, where social media sites really shine is in givingincreased visibility and otherwise unattainable exposure to relativelyunknown sites. For a site that is generally unknown, has little or noPageRank and no inbound links or RSS subscribers, you may be lucky toget 10-20 Google visitors a day. Once you get submitted to social newssites, however, not only can you expect tens of thousands of visitorsin the next 24 hours from those sites, but your average long-termsearch traffic and visibility will increase dramatically. So even ifyou completely discount the social media traffic and the low CTRthere, the fact that your Google traffic may quadruplefollowing social media success, is alone worth the effort.For more discussion, don't forget to follow the topic at Reddit (here) and Digg (here).

  The NY Timeshas another of those 'Mobile Web isn't living up to the hype' articles that have become so familiar since, oh, the late 90's when WAP came onto the scene. The NYT quotes statistics from Rethink Research, stating that data will make up only 12 percent of average mobile phone revenue per user in 2007. Further, surveys by Yankee Group show that "only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web more than once a month, while 70 percent of computer users view Web sites every day."I have to admit I've only just become a Mobile Web convert, after purchasing an iPhone on my recent trip to the States. I now use the Mobile Web frequently, to check RWW and other sites during the day when I'm out and about -- or simply when curled up in the sofa at the end of the day, trying to relax.So with all that in mind, it'd be interesting to survey how many RWW readers use the Mobile Web. Please participate in our poll below:survey software- Take Our Poll

  Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feedor by email.Note:This is a shortened version of the Wrapup, due to Thanksgiving in the US.Here is a sample of our best posts this week:Amazon Sets eBook World Alight with Kindle, New Internet-enabled eReader DeviceThe RWW Guide to the World's Most Popular Twitter ClientsSocial Graph &Beyond: Tim Berners-Lee's Graph is The Next LevelR/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters)Firefox 3 Beta Hits the Web - Faster, But Still a Memory HogStudy: Web Will Slow by 2010SpiralFrog Loses $3m in 3 months: Not "Getting It" is Getting ExpensiveThe Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social NetworksThe Rise Of Hyperlocal InformationDeconstructing the Business Social NetworkVisualizing Social Software Best Practices: Three ApproachesIs Facebook Really Ruining Christmas?Newspaper Ad Sales Up Online, Down in PrintPoll: Will You Have More Business Contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn, in 6 Months?(results below)Poll ResultsIn 6 months time, will you have more business contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn?Yes, Facebook will have more 26% (116 votes)No, LinkedIn will still have more 68% (307 votes)They will be even 6% (29 votes)That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

  Indian company InstaColl today formally launchedLive Documents, a mini-office suite of products similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Live Documents has already received plenty of press coverage, mainly because it was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia - the man who famously sold web mail service Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million in 1998.Live Documents was built using RIA technologiesincluding Flash and Flex, which the company claims gives it a "user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications." In its launch announcement, Live Documents is being heavily positioned as a Microsoft Office competitor - and complement. On the latter, the company says that "Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications." There is also offline access.It's also clear that Live Documents is leveraging the Microsoft brand - from the "Live" brand name, to the claim that it has a “Services plus Softwareâ€� approach (Microsoft's calls this"software plus services").Continuing the 'embrace and extend' Microsoft theme, InstaColl CTO Adarsh Kini claims that Live Documents "break's Microsoft's proprietary format lock-in and builds a bridge with other document standards such as Open Office". He also says their service "matches features found only in the latest version of Office (Office 2007)", so giving users a reason to avoid upgrading their MS Office software.It's clever marketing all round (or a "a shameless rip-offof the MS brand", depending on your pov!) and, as Nick Carr pointed out, India alone is a potentially huge market for Live Documents to take on Microsoft Office. Dan Farber also has a good post, giving context on the Web Office space in general - which is very crowded. But the problem is that nobody has yet seen the software in action, so it's difficult to say how Live Documents compares with the likes of Google D&S, Zoho, and ThinkFree.Live Documents first surfaced in Sept 2006, and its current incarnation seems high on hyperboleand low on beta product action. So all we can do, like everyone else, is sign up to the invite beta and wait and see if the PR bluster will be backed up by the actual product.

  Onaswarmis a new lifestreaming application from Toronto's David Jane and BlogMatrix. Lifestreaming is something people do with a growing class of services that let you display all your activities across different websites, through aggregating the RSS feeds from your accounts on one page. Onaswarm a smart, interesting service that combines groups, microformatsand flashes of really good usability. The service is in private beta, but readers here who request accounts and include the letters RWW in their entries to the request form will be given accounts promptly.It's very text-centric and clearly better for geeks than it is for the artists who like Tumblr, for example. The Onaswarm site architecture and navigation need a substantial overhaul to improve usability, despite some nice touches. That said, it's still in better shape than lifestrea.ms waswhen I reviewed that competing service.The feed discovery process is very nice; Onaswarm lets you enter various usernames you use on different sites, then searches for RSS feeds based on those usernames. I like it.Item display is a bit unorthodox but I think I like it. The most recent time that a certain feed updated is displayed, followed by other updates from that same feed from earlier in the day, followed by the second most recent feed to have updated. It's hard to explain and it wasn't completely clear to me, but after asking for clarification it makes sense.You can view all of someone's updates or just "front page" level, or high priority, updates. That's a nice touch.Adding friends should give you an opportunity to send them a message, but it doesn't. OpenID login is supported, the calendaring is microformats-based and the note writing process is good. I'd like to get the geeks in Portland, Oregon to join the Portland Swarm so we can keep track of each other's blog posts, tweets, tags and events. Swarm members have group posting privileges, a common calendar and item aggregation.Onaswarmis a potentially powerful tool. It's like a gestural feed reader for groups. If usability and aesthetics can improve just enough, then this one could become a valued service for many groups of people online.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Spam_Will_Outnumber_Legit_Email_For_First_Time';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Reasearchers at IDC predict that this year the number of spam messages sent will eclipse the amount of legit email correspondence for the first time ever, reports USA Today. Approximately 10.8 trillion spam messages will have crossed through inboxes in the past year, compared to 10.5 trillion legitimate person-to-person email messages. The numbers indicate that spam is a growing problem, despite the promise of better filtering technology."Two years from now, spam will be solved," said Bill Gates in 2004 addressing World Economic Forum in Switzerland. But 2007 will go down as the worst year yet for spam, a trend that has held for the past four years, according to Rebecca Steinberg Herson, vice president of marketing at Commtouch, an email security firm.In an interview last month with USA Today, Gates reminded that though the volume of spam has increased, more of it is being deleted by spam filters. "Sure, there's a lot [of spam] out there, but software is deleting 99.9% of that anyway," he said, though Microsoft has revised that claim to 85% - 95%.Gates does have a point -- spam filters are getting better. For example, last January, 50% of all spam was image based, but due to better filtering technology, Symantec now says that the percentage of image spam has dropped to just 8%. These quick advances in spam-fighting technologies force spammers to constantly change and update their methods. Eventually, researchers believe that better filters will begin to reduce spam from a colossal pain to a minor annoyance."As more people have inboxes protected by better and better spam filters, their experience of spam gets closer to Gates' vision," Richi Jennings, lead analyst at email security at Ferris Research, told USA Today. "He was a bit overaggressive with the prediction, of course. But spam isn't an easy problem to solve."

  Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog postabout what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision. Referencing both Brad Fitzpatrick's influential postearlier this year on Social Graph, and our own Alex Iskold's analysis of Social Graph concepts, Berners-Lee went on to position the Graph as the third main "level" of computer networks. First there was the Internet, then the Web, and now the Graph - which Sir Tim labeled (somewhat tongue in cheek) the Giant Global Graph! Note that Berners-Lee wasn't specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (a.k.a. layers of abstraction):1. The Internet: links computers2. Web: links documents3. Graph: links relationships between people and/or documents -- "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:"So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology -- it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer."Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "...at each layer --- Net, Web, or Graph --- we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected - for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google's OpenSocial aims to achieve.What's more, says Berners-Lee, the Graph has major implications for the Mobile Web. He said that longer term "thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system." The following scenario sums it up very nicely:"Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."ConclusionI'm very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Appsare so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I'm not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term 'Graph' or 'Social Graph'. It really doesn't matter, so long as the web apps that people use enablethem to participate in this 'next level' of the Web. That's what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.Incidentally, it's great to see Tim Berners-Lee 're-using' concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it's fantastic he is reaching out to the 'web 2.0' community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.Related:check out Alex Iskold's Social Graph: Concepts and Issuesfor an overview of the theory behind Social Graph. This is the post Tim Berners-Lee referenced. Also check out Alex's latest post today: R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters).

  At the risk of reporting rumors (ahem), I can't resist making a note of this one. For the past couple of weeks we have been analyzing LinkedIn and comparing it to Facebook. When I say 'we', I mean Bernard Lunn. But it's a topic a fewof ushave written about in the past here at RWW. Bernard wrote a post at the end of last week entitled LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking. In that post he listed ways that LinkedIn could take advantage of the relatively untapped business networking market.Some of the feedback on Bernard's post suggested that it's Facebook which will take advantage of business networking opportunities, moreso than LinkedIn. So at the beginning of this week, we ran a pollasking: In 6 months time, will you have more business contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn? The poll is still running (see bottom of this page), but the current results are in favor of LinkedIn:Yes, Facebook will have more 27% (102 votes)No, LinkedIn will still have more 66% (245 votes)They will be even 6% (24 votes)So about 2/3 of poll respondents think LinkedIn will be where we do our business networking. Which brings us to the rumor: that News Corp may acquire LinkedIn, which will bring it under the same corporate umbrella as MySpace. As if Facebook doesn't have enough competition alreadywith Google OpenSocial, a MySpace/LinkedIn tag team would really put the squeeze on.As Bernard noted in his post this week, Deconstructing the Business Social Network, to compete on its own LinkedIn probably needs to move away from being a destination site and open up its data via API. There is just too much competition out there from start pages, email services and social networks.However if they did get acquired by News Corp, that would give LinkedIn a foundation to hold onto its goal of being the destination site of choice for business networking. It's hard to see MySpace being leveraged by LinkedIn, as their audiences are so different. But as Techcrunch UK pointed out, News Corp has a number of newspapers that professionals read - including The Wall Street Journal and (in the UK) The Times and The Sunday Times - so LinkedIn could definitely leverage those.An acquisition of LinkedIn by News Corp would make sense for both parties. And as LinkedIn is a part of OpenSocial (as is MySpace), that would put even more pressure on Facebook to join OpenSocial. So it'd be a win for Google too, if Rupert buys LinkedIn. What do you think? And if you haven't already, please take part in our poll below:survey- Take Our Poll