IBM has opened access to Bluehouse, a “Facebook for business” service based on IBM’s Lotus Foundations.
Bluehouse offers regular social networking tools, tailored to corporate use, including web conferencing, instant messaging, document sharing, directory, profiles, all delivered via the web.
Sean Poulley, vice president of IBM’s online collaboration services told Computerworld that “Bluehouse will allow people [...]

Friendster is now officially friends with Facebook. Asia’s social network of choice announced that it has deployed support for Facebook Platform as part of the Friendster Developer Platform. Developers can now introduce the applications and features they’ve built on the Facebook Platform to its community of 80 million users.
This move makes Friendster the first [...]

What Mark Zuckerberg giveth, he taketh away. When Facebook launched F8, its developer platform in May 2007, the announcement met with near universal praise. Facebook was the then number two player in the social networking space, and for a first among the leading players at the time, was opening its doors to third party developers. [...]

Flickr is offering a sneak look at their new layout, in a move said to make the Flickr experience more social.
Added to the page are group photos (it was previously just a link) and “interesting photos” below the fold. This is the official spin:
Whatever the best part of Flickr is for you, your new home [...]

A mysterious browser plug-in billed as an all-around 2.0 solution is finally about to launch. SemantiNet has been developing its tool in Israel since 2006 and now says it’ll be released next month. The company has also just raised $3.4 million and is preparing to open an office in the heart of Silicon [...]

Yahoo has announced that it will be shutting Yahoo Mash, a little known Facebook competitor which apparently launched last year.
According to Mashable, users of Mash were sent a notice saying that the service would shut September 29. From what I can gather trying to login to the site, Mash never left closed invite only beta, [...]

This post is a guest post by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, contributing editor at The Industry Standard.
With the rise of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn comes a rise in a market designed to “teach” companies how to leverage social media sites for business purposes. But aside from marketing initiatives, are these sites really valuable [...]

Arzoola has now launched its free private call platform for Facebook.
We first wrote about the company’s Social Call tool earlier this month when its HTML-driven Craigslist application — now rebranded as Private Call — came out. The Facebook utility offers the same service, just specifically catered to Facebook profiles.
Basically, Social Call gives you anonymous [...]

Facebook is trying to mine precious advertising value from its young, computer-savvy userbase with a new “social advertising” approach. Our prediction: It will either present a huge profit or a huge disaster.
The plan, currently being tested in small doses but not yet formally announced, is basically to treat the ads like the rest of [...]

The hot, and perhaps somewhat bizarre rumor doing the rounds has the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS, or Mormons) offering to buy Facebook. As Cyndy Aleo-Carreira points out at The Industry Standard, the buy makes some sense when you consider the family networks on Facebook and the Mormons fascination with family history. World wide [...]

Every now and then in life you find something that makes so much sense you pause to note “why didn’t I think of that?” America, and much of the Western world loves Bacon, but as we all know Bacon is a recipe for cholesterol and taken too often is a heart attack waiting to happen. [...]

A new startup is trying to take social networking up a notch by providing a graphical timeline of your life.
Lifehaps gives you the ability to plot out all your life’s events — ranging from your birth to that concert you’re seeing next month — and then share the data with friends. It’s kind of [...]

In a decision that has interesting repercussions for the web industry, the California State Supreme Court has ruled that non-compete clauses in employment contracts are not enforceable in California.
Non-competes, for those who have never dealt with them, restrict employees who leave their existing jobs from taking a similar role in another company or to start [...]