More May ‘08 blogging
The One Upmanship continues. MySpace announces DataAVAILABILITY between MySpace and ebay, Yahoo, PhotoBucket and Twitter. This is INCREDIBLE news. More to follow. Chris DeWolfe: “Today MySpace no longer operates as an autonomous island on the Internet….we’re hoping to create a significantly more social experience across the Web.” Amit Kapur: “DataAvailability is founded first and foremost on allowing users to have comprehensive control over their content and data.” This will make next week’s Data Sharing Summit even MORE interesting! I just love it when these behemoths start using openness as competitive advantage.
Why is it called Data Availability rather than DataPortability? What about OpenSocial? And why isn’t Yahoo leading this announcement? Hmmmmm - Yes - very hmmmmmm
Frengo is doing some totally coolio inter-connection between social networks! To quote their CEO (Mahi de Silva): “What we do may not appear to be aligned with the business goals of social networks.” 
But I really think this DOES increase value - for all parties!
Facebook is announcing all sorts of onerous “keep this place clean” efforts. Though I certainly support these efforts and I’m sorry for the extra costs they’ll incur I also think this will slow down the ‘opening up of user’s data’. 
Murdoch’s opportunity to sell off MySpace high - has passed. And usage on Facebook has slowed. So the migratory humans continue their journey.
Revisiting Cluetrain looks like it’ll be a great event.
There’s no need of a Facebook India - there’s iTimes.com
Dan Farber reports on the unfortunate demise of free refills.
Ted Leung reports on CommunityOne
Even though its funny to joke about ’some’ friends bering worthless - this calls to a head the very issue I hate most about social networking. That from a business POV its all about monetizing people. If (God Forbid) folks would change this attitude and see relationships (in every shape and size) as opportunities to connect people together to facilitate and enable all sorts of great new activities - then the monetization happens with those activities. NOT in the people’s eyeballs and page counting. That is so conflicting with the very nature of ‘relationships‘.
Sun has hooked up with Amazon and will ‘resell’ their grid web services. This seems like a final admission of defeat by Sun. Shouldn’t they have their OWN grid and web services on-demand. Kind of pathetic really. So Sun goes from “building the network” and inventing Java to - what? Yet another system integrator and channel presence? But at least they can get Neil Young to play along.
Congrats to the folks at Slideshare. I really like this approach. Macromedia has a slide show thingie - that they charged $10k for. This is what they should have been doing. Another example of how clueless Macromedia has been. But meanwhile kickass technologies and companies continue to thrive off their missed opportunities.
Google translate rising. I’ve been a loyal Babelfish customer, but now……
New version of Orb a software Sling Box
More details on how badly Verisign wants to get rid of Kontiki
The rise of video comments and Seesmic. Looks like Loic is getting work done.
Piet, xrdstype.net, OpenDD, Dragonfly, Lycos Cinema, Enomaly, Connectbeam, SearchMonkey, Tributes, Mosso, Bizzlr, Piwik, SitePoint, Lefora, Coolspotters, Yoono,