The following is from SAI, about Fox Interactive Media’s (NWS) revenues:

Mobile social network Next2Friends has bought BluetoothMeet, an early stage UK mobile social network business, ahead of its planned launch this month.

Following a four month beta period, Next2Friends has a network of thousands of members across 129 countries.

The Next2Friends technology platform incorporates a range of mobile communication and broadcast features.

BluetoothMeet soft-launched at the end of 2007 and quickly built a strong network of loyal users. Students make up a large portion of the 18-25 year old user base, using it to keep in touch and make new contacts via the Bluetooth service.

Users have already migrated across to the fuller-featured beta stage service and Luke Rose, founder of BluetoothMeet, has joined the Next2Friends UK team to develop its proximity-marketing programme. 

“Bluetooth-tagging is a key mobile application for the future;” commented Anthony Nystrom, CTO of Next2Friends. “Luke’s vision and passion for its potential evolution is a great fit with what we’re looking to achieve in the area and his knowledge and experience will enable Next2Friends to engage with businesses as well as consumers ahead of our planned schedule.”

 Next2Friends will be creating third party marketing and promotional opportunities utilising its Tag & Meet technology. 

Chiefly for informing users of people with shared interests in their physical world, the feature also offers the opportunity for venues, event organisers, brands and retailers to engage with potential consumers based on location.

As the Next2Friends network grows, it will also offer targeted services based on interests, activity and demographics.

The UK launch will coincide with a US programme and set the stage for a global marketing service focused on mobile hot spots around the world

Forbes.com has announced the launch of AnswerNetwork, a global social network aimed at international businessmen.

The new social network aims to encourage the media brand’s core readership of business people, to exchange knowledge and expertise with their friends and family.

It comes five months after Forbes.com’s international competitors, The Economist, announced plans to launch an international social network.

Many small and medium sized businesses may have an interest in maintaining a presence on social networks, but don’t the time, money, or resources to do so. For them, a new service provided by a company called Bizzlr can help. For a small monthly fee, companies can use Bizzlr’s solution to connect with customers on many of the major social networks.

About Bizzlr

With the top social networks having 183 million users, 70% of them being 15-34 year olds, Bizzlr realized there was a real need to provide tools to businesses that wouldn’t otherwise have the ability to reach their customers on these platforms.

To aid these businesses in expanding their reach, Bizzlr has just launched their turnkey solution, which comes  in the form of an social network application and is currently available on Facebook, MySpace, and Hi5. Support for Bebo, LinkedIn, and Ning is said to be coming soon. The application supports both the Facebook API and the OpenSocial API, so it will work on most of the major social networks.

With Bizzlr, companies, even small ones that don’t have their own web site, can connect with their customers quickly and easily on the social networks where their customers spend their time. The fee for doing so is an affordable $19.95/month (or $199/year), so it’s not out of the reach of any mom-and-pop shop.

Amid all the initiatives in which Internet companies are supposed to make friends with each other—such as Facebook’s Platform and Google’s rival OpenSocial initiative—the announcement today by MySpace may well be the most useful to ordinary people and thus the most important.

MySpace has created a series of handy tools that solve real problems. Well, they are real to the extent that anything involving socializing through a keyboard and screen is real. Never mind that MySpace calls all this its “data availability initiative.”

The first problem it solves is how every site wants users to create a profile—a page with your picture, your favorite TV shows and what you ate for lunch. Lots of people want to have online profiles—that desire helped attract many of MySpace’s 117 million users. But fewer people really want to re-type and update profiles all over the Web.

So MySpace created an easy way to zap the information from your MySpace profile onto the profiles of other sites. Sign up for Twitter—the microblogging service that has obsessed a hardcore slice of Silicon Valley—and you can pull in the photo on your MySpace profile rather than uploading a new photo. One neat trick is that any time you update your photo or other information on MySpace it will instantly be updated on the sites on which you placed the data.

The service won’t be turned on for a few weeks, so we can’t see it yet. But from the way it is described, the privacy issues are handled in a straightforward way. Data is only moved from MySpace when you authorize it. MySpace will give users control over what data is given to whom. And users can cut off the exchange of information at any time. (MySpace says that sites that participate will have to promise not to keep any of the photos and other information they display, but I’m not sure how they can enforce that.)

MySpace has a good list of initial sites that will use some version of this feature: Yahoo, eBay, PhotoBucket, and yes Twitter. Interestingly, Google, which has a tight relationship with MySpace, is absent from the list.

In the footnotes of the MySpace announcement is one feature that ultimately could be even more useful: The ability to export “friends.” The details don’t seem to be worked out yet, but this may mean that if some new social networking idea comes along, you don’t have to make a list of all your friends again because you can use your existing list of MySpace friends.

Compare this to the Facebook Platform, which can be seen as the closed model of openness. Pretty much everything that uses the Facebook platform happens on the Facebook site. There are a few interesting sharing applications—like the ability to show the music you like on Pandora or Last.FM. There are some fun games like Scabulous. And there is a lot of randomness like turning your friends into vampires.

But Facebook missed the boat by not emphasizing how it can help improve the experiences on other sites. Take its integration with Blockbuster. Yes, you may want to show friends on Facebook what movies you are renting (or you may very well not). But when you are using Blockbuster.com, that is when you may well want to have your friend’s movie preferences available. (Facebook does have a few applications of this sort, but it hasn’t been the focus.)

Similarly, Google’s OpenSocial is for now mainly about embedding applications into social networking sites, not exporting information to other sites. MySpace says it will work with OpenSocial—which is turning into a consortium—to add this sort of feature to its standards. Facebook is sure to follow quickly.

MySpace doesn’t make money off any of this directly. It doesn’t charge money to the sites that use the profile information or place ads on them. But as many people see the importance of having an online profile to express themselves to friends and strangers, the battle is increasingly about becoming people’s primary profile, just as companies fight to be people’s main e-mail provider.

For MySpace, this initiative may mark an acceleration of innovation. Ever since it was bought by the News Corporation, MySpace seems to have spent most of its time trying to find ways to sell ads and has lost the momentum in developing social features for users to Facebook. That said, it still has a huge and vibrant user base.

Of course, pretty much all of the early adopter types who will get excited about the concept of MySpace’s new features have already moved to Facebook. But that may not matter, because what MySpace is doing is something that people may really want to use, rather than just something to Twitter about