Social Networks
Busy month in the internet space.

http://personals.salon.com (and onion.com, and, and) formerly springstreet networks went kaput, and switched over to fastcupid's system, who not surprisingly is turning things into a social network (peer ratings, add friends, join community, etc). More interesting to me is they've added MBTI, the quiz is brief (and in someways stilted), but guessed me as an INTP (unsure if any other metric like degree of introversion is measured). They are suggesting I pair up best with oddly non NT's and NF.
They have 2 pricing models strongly incentivized towards yearly memberships, it will be interesting to see how they do.

Much buzz on Ning.com, which lets people do cool stuff, like cloning sites e.g taking a friendster clone and turning it into bulldogster for pets to address the long tail. Great idea, it will be interesting to see with the barrier to entry into SN taken away, how much of a community people can build when there are so many to choose from, and perhaps so little reasons to stay, unsure what degree peoples profiles will migrate from flavor to flavor. It reminds me of the early days of internet authoring, where color every letter or blinky text was abused, not adding much value except to the author when it's really all about how you attract and build and keep a community, which always takes a strong personality/purpose/content. Ning will let existing communities connect to each other and build stronger communities. I expect to see large corps and communities like MoveOn pick up these tools. This should be cool as a purely connection based sites don't integrate nicely with peoples lives, e.g. going to match.com to find two people who like They Might Be Giatns, unlike say livejournal where those connections have meaning/purpose on a daily level. It would seem it's now officially pointless to get into the SN space, but they still have a long way to go: so now any community can build itself a site easily, but pivoting on a single tag/interest is closer but still a ways from what it could, should and will need to be.

Within 10 years the number of people using SN sites is going to explode, and since it's lost it's stigma for the most part, eventually between rich media, and mobile devices, and rich communities and persistent online identities, I expect it to become a baseline for people with expectations. As far as we've come, so far I haven't seen a site ready to tackle that future. In some cases the technology isn't there, in others the audience isn't ready/listening yet.