Business 2.0 recently ran an article that interviewed some of the top Venture Capitalists about startup ideas that they are anxious to invest in. Not suprisingly, one of those ideas from Jim Breyer, partner of Accel Partners, involves a social network. Jim Breyer was stated as willing to invest $10 Million in the following idea: “Social-networking sites may be sprouting like weeds, but none yet operates as a bona fide marketplace, with members buying and selling their own creations as much as they blog, link, and post. Breyer, who sits on Wal-Mart’s board, is interested in backing...

With the boom of social networking, what could be considered a great niche 3 months ago, is now being considered a common playing field. Areas that use to be deemed an under served niche, now have 3, 4, or even 5 + social networks aiming to serve the same space. Here are just a few examples: Athletic Training The recent launch of Traineo, makes the third social networking site to launch in the past 2 months targeting physical training, body building, and working out. Bulkd.com was the original on the scene, and bodybuilding.com’s BodySpace.com recently launched a few...

After receiving $3.1 million in funding only a few months ago, social networking veteran, Friendster, has received another $10 million from Palo Alto-based DAG Ventures. This comes at a time when the market is being flooded with new social networks and Myspace, Facebook, and Bebo seem to be dominating. Yes, Friendster has around 30 million users which is not too shabby, but how many of those users are active on a weekly basis? The only new development Friendster has announced with the new round of funding is the fact that they will be targeting 20 - 30 year olds. This is...

Univillage is another social network for college (or “uni” in the UK) students. The only difference is that they are going after the international space that Facebook has decided to avoid. While Univillage has a very clean and eye appealing design, along with some solid social networking features, I am currently not seeing anything strikingly unique. With the UK market being dominated by Myspace and Bebo, the ever so common question gets asked; can univillage attract users away? Probably not. But the reason I am writing about Univillage is to point out an incredibly annoying feature,...

Yes Yes, I know I have been extremely lame and went MIA for a couple months. But starting this weekend I will be back in action full time. I’ve been thinking a lot about the social networking scene lately and how it is impacting our lives. I hope to have some great stuff not only about new startups but also how the social networking scene is changing the social fabric of our lives. So where did I disappear to for the past couple months? I’ll let the imaginative minds out there come up with some guesses. But the important thing is that you need...

Multiple blogs such as Techcrunch and Mashable are reporting that popular social networking site, Bebo.com, turned down a $550 offer from British Telecom. This doesn’t surprise me, and in my opinion probably the right move for Bebo. Bebo has definitely not reached their peak and this offer is similar in price to number of members ratio as the myspace acquisition. Bebo knows it is going to be growing rapidly over the next 6 months similar to what Myspace did. A social networks value is in their members plus their target/niche market. Since Bebo’s target market is everyone,...

Mashable reports that friendster has won a patent in social networking. From the original Red Herring article: “The new Friendster patent covers the basic steps involved in joining a social network: entering a personal description and relationships to other users, mapping relationships and degrees of separation, and connecting to others through these friends.” No word on if Friendster will pursue licensing fees from their competitors, but if they do it could seriously hinder the social networking scene. This could be a saving grace for friendster, and provides more insight into why...

Valleywag reports an unconfirmed rumor that NBC is to buy social networking site Tribe.net. Tribe has been around since 2003 and works off of local area interest groups. Tribe would fit the bill for NBC as they recently bought iVillage, a community for women, for $600 million and just struck an advertising deal with YouTube. This comes as a saving grace to Tribe’s investors as back in June it was also reported by Valleywag that Tribe was severly struggling and considering shutting down the whole operation. [tags]Social Networking, Social Network, buy out, nbc, Tribe,...

YouthNoise, a social network for social change has raised $1.5 million in venture capital. The site currently has around 113,000 members with over 3 million page views per month. The round of funding was lead by Pierre Omidyar, founder of Ebay.  YouthNoise is non-profit.

The term social networking has become more main stream with the publicity of sites such as Myspace and Facebook. As a result large corporations are following suit wanting to jump on the social networking bandwagon even if they don’t know what it really is. To take advantage of this, a couple companies promoting an “all in one” social networking package have emerged. Web Crossing and Eventrobot.com are trying to find major players to integrate their social networking platform in with their online presence. For example, eventrobot’s most recent project...