Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch has some screenshots of the soon to be released AIM pages. Like I said before, I think AOL will attract a good amount of users by leveraging their massive Instant Messanger user base. But from the new screenshots it doesn’t look like there is anything new and unique in their social networking model. My question is, what in the world took AOL so long to come up with AIM pages? With the IM platform they should of implemented this a year ago. [tags]Social Networking, AOL, Aim Pages, Techcrunch, Brian Balfour[/tags] Related Posts: AIM Pages Sets May 16...

Online social networking has evolved immensely over the past 5 years. This first part in a 2 part series is meant to explore the past of social networking and where we are today. In my second part that I will post tomorrow, I will discuss what I believe is the future of social networking. While most of this information will be old news to you it is meant to set up my post for tomorrow. Period One – Anyone and Everyone Most people agree that the first large site deemed “social networking” was Friendster. Friendster made the “friend...

AOL has set a launch date for their new social networking site called AIM Pages. As you could expect the heart of the service will be its Instant Messaging service. While I think AOL will have a ton of leverage in gaining users due to their dominance in the IM market I’m not sure that they will have a unique enough take on social networking to compete with the big boys. I guess we will find out on May 16th. [tags]Social Networking, AOL, AIM, AIM Pages, Brian Balfour[/tags]

Social Networking site Bebo has reportedly made big gains on giant MySpace.com in the UK (via Mashable). The Guardian reports: “Bebo ranked third most popular among all UK internet searches for the month to April 29, compared with MySpace, which ranked just 24th, according to figures from Hitwise UK…Bebo is closing the gap rapidly. In the eight weeks to April 29, Bebo’s share of visits rose 45% compared with 29% for MySpace.” This probably isn’t news to MySpace as they recently announced that they were establishing an office in London to concentrate on building...

I ran across a post on Steve Rubel’s blog, Micro Persuasion, talking about a new social networking startup named Palopia. Palopia founded by a group of USC business students, states on their website: “Palopia is a social networking portal made by real students for real students with real lives. It’s not just about profiles and comments anymore. We’ve spent long days and nights figuring out what needs to be better to make our online lives easier, more rewarding, and more enjoyable. We built our network from the ground up–understanding what our...