Mobile social networking is still in the fledgling stages in the West. In Japan, it is already a reality. One company in particular, DeNA, has taken Japan by storm with its mobile SNS/virtual world/gaming platform Mobage-town. DeNA opened a US office in San Mateo earlier this year, with plans to offer an English version of Mobage-town this fall.

Search is Happening in Israel

Last week we saw a of four different Israeli search engines covering an array of search specialties—Smart search with Semantinet, health search with iMedix, internet relay chat search with IRSeeK, and strength in numbers with Gogimon. Today we’ll look at another four specialty categories.

Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin are studying ways in which MMO history could be recorded. Key events mentioned as perhaps worthy of documenting include an outbreak of virtual plague in World of Warcraft, the assassination of Lord British in Ultima Online and the death of Morpheus in The Matrix Online.

Said Prof. Megan Winget: “A lot of people have mentioned [Lord British’s death] to me as a pivotal moment in their lives. I would like to talk to people who experienced that, saw it happen or where they were when they heard about it. Maybe we can talk to the people who did it and whether they knew Lord British was [Ultima series creator] Richard Garriott.”

The Fallacy of Internet Ad Personlization . . . and the Bleak Future for Social Network Ads

At Pingdom we have looked at 12 of the top social networks to answer a simple, but highly interesting question:

Where are they the most popular?

The social networks we included in this survey were MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter.

= Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada.
= Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines.
= LinkedIn is most popular in India.
= Twitter is most popular in Japan.
= LiveJournal is more popular in Russia than it is in the United States.
= Orkut is more popular in Iran (10th country popularity-wise) than it is in the United States.
= MySpace is the only social network which is most popular in the United States.
= MySpace, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Xanga, and Twitter are the only social networks in this survey which have the United States in their top five countries, popularity-wise. That is just five out of twelve.

Even though Facebook is now the largest social network in the world,—with 132 million unique visitors in June—it is also still the fastest growing.
(At least among the major social networks). According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3 percent growth for MySpace. Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5 (100 percent) and Friendster (50 percent), despite each of those being less than half the size of Facebook. Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41 percent and 32 percent growth, respectively.

Personal Life Media has just launched a new customizable widget-creator. With it, you create the branded widget, and Personal Life Media will fill it with great audio content. Personal Life Media is headed by social media legend Susan Bratton who tells us, “So many of our sponsors and prospective advertisers requested a way to showcase our content on their site that we created this widget for them.”

Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type

With Six Apart’s recent release of Movable Type 4.2, a new revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more. WordPress isn’t too far behind, either - a new platform called BuddyPress, is being built on the WordPress core. Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether?

40+ Topics for Corporate Bloggers

There will be times that you have to contribute a post for your company’s blog and you just don’t have one idea that inspires you to start a conversation. We’ve all been there and that’s why we’ve created this resource with more than 40 topics for corporate bloggers to help provide that much need inspiration . . .

The real impact of YouTube on the sporting world — which has grown into an 83.4 million-video giant in just its third year of existence — lies in its ability to distribute a breadth of content to a massive audience. It’s estimated that the bandwidth on YouTube in 2007 exceeded that of the whole Internet in 2000.