Early this morning I received an email with a this link to an article claiming that LinkedIN is in negotiations to raise another $13 million in venture capital. This struck me as kind of odd. LinkedIN claims it has been profitable since March of this year which means they aren’t burning a ton of cash. It seems likely that before they turned profitable they would still have had money left from their previous venture rounds. In addition, it is unusual for a company to be publicly talking about this before the deal is done. So why would LinkedIN want to raise another $13 Million? I think...

Disclaimer: This information has not been confirmed by Facebook, only third party sources that I personally trust. Take this information with a grain of salt. Lately the blogosphere has been actively chatting about Facebook not interested in selling. Board member Peter Theil has been quoted as saying they believe Facebook is worth the equivalent to MTV, $8 Billion. In addition to these reports there have been rumors that Facebook is considering an IPO. This interested me to the point that I called up two close friends who work at seperate major Investment Banks. To my surprise, both of them...

I haven’t used Loopt.com service since I don’t have Boost Mobile phone, but from reading about the service it seems to have a lot of the elements of the next generation SN I have been talking about. Loopt is a GPS location based mobile social network available to Boost Mobile customers for $2.99 a month. From their website: “Loopt is a Palo Alto-based startup that has built a revolutionary “social mapping” service to change the way people use mobile phones to keep in touch with their friends. loopt uses GPS (and other location technology) to show you where your friends...

Many new founders of social networks, community, and Web 2.0 sites have seen the success of such sites as Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Craigslist, etc and are amazed at how quickly and relatively effortless they grew. I think this has lead to a mindset among social media entrepreneurs that if they build it, the site will grow itself. In addition, some might think the growth of those sites were just pure luck. In my opinion neither of these are true, and that there is some method to the madness of growing a community site. Growth can never be achieved 100% organically By organic growth, I...

My friend Noah Kagan from OkDork.com has a good post over at venturebeat on community. Go read it. If you don’t like the article, then you can at least see a larger version of this sexy picture.

How many posts have you read saying that a new social network might be the next Myspace? Probably at least 100. Which is why I’m not going to say that I think Virb.com is a myspace killer. I will say though that I am more excited about seeing the full launch of Virb then any other social network in a very very long time. Virb.com comes from Unborn Media, the founders of another incredible site, PureVolume.com. Unborn has done a fantastic job with design, usability, and quality of Purevolume which is why I think it blows any other music site away. The...

One of the most successful niche social networks on the web is one that you would probably never guess. It’s not about sports, stocks, or business, but rather the subject of goth. VampireFreaks.com looks like a website you probably built in the 3rd grade, but before you knock it, check out the numbers. Vampirefreaks.com boasts over 710,000 members, with around 400,000 considered to be active users. Around 100,000 new users have signed up since mid September. The site receives around 150,000 unique visitors per day with 3 million page views. At the...