Social networking through Web sites like Facebook is catching on in the corporate world, where companies such as Dow Chemical Co. are creating their own in-house networks for employees.”One of the objectives is to use it as a recruiting tool. It’s also a way just to connect with other Dow folks and keep in touch,” said Trish Bharwada, administrator of the company’s new My Dow Network.

The network has signed up about 5,300 Dow employees, retirees and former employees in the five months it’s been operating in the United States, Bharwada said. Eventually, it could expand to Dow’s global work force.
My Dow Network is designed to promote professional ties, allow employees to share ideas and provide a way to distribute company news, events and job openings, she said.

By overseeing its own network, Dow has more control over content than it would by using outside Web sites such as Facebook or a site for business professionals called LinkedIn. It’s also a secure network requiring a password to access.

Pankaj Gupta, a 31-year-old development specialist with Dow in Midland, joined My Dow Network to keep in touch with former associates after he was transferred from Texas to Michigan.

Since then, he’s used the site to expand his contacts within the company.

“If I see somebody in the secondary network I might like to meet, I just send them an invite and later on we’ll go for lunch or something,” Gupta said. “That’s how you learn about people and make contacts.”

Social networks have taken the Internet by storm. Acquaintances who have not seen one another for years stay up-to-date on one another’s lives through the photos and stories posted on MySpace and Facebook, and new friendships can even be made via groups and message boards. Now imagine if these tools were not just used for social purposes, but also to educate investors and connect them with one another.

Sites such as BiggerPockets, The Flipping Pad and the Black Widow Network are bringing social network functionality to the world of real estate investment. Investors may want to consider the benefits that such networks can offer, whether they are new to real estate investing or are full-time investors who have been making deals for years.

BiggerPockets.com was founded in August 2004. “I looked around and there were a bunch of sites that…were pretty useful, but I felt these sites’ primary purpose wasn’t to assist people in their education. Their purpose, I felt, was to sell stuff,” Joshua Dorkin, founder and CEO of BiggerPockets, said. “The idea came to me [to] create a site where people don’t really have to worry that the main focus is going to be some sort of sales pitch; let’s create a site where people can…learn, network and make deals.”

Fear often stops new investors from taking the proverbial plunge. A lack of knowledge coupled with a fear of failure can be the death knell for uncertain newbies. Or, if they decide to soldier on without thoroughly educating themselves or knowing where to go for help, it can spell financial disaster. But new investors who join a real estate investment social networking site have access to insights from seasoned investors and can even meet potential investment partners to help them along the way.

Friendster, Inc. (http://www.friendster.com) today announced that Friendster.com is available in Vietnamese, allowing Friendster users and visitors a greater choice of languages with which to navigate the site, enter content and use Friendster’s complete set of social networking features.

The 18 million Internet users in Vietnam and Vietnamese around the world can now easily join and use Friendster, the pioneer of social networking that is now the 8th largest website globally of any kind based on traffic.(1)

Friendster currently fully supports eight languages - English, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

These languages represent over 67 per cent of the world’s Internet users, or over three quarters of a billion Internet users in total.

“Since Friendster is the #1 social network in all of Asia and has more than twice the users of any other social network in Asia, the Friendster social networking experience clearly resonates with its 50 million users across Asia,” said David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster.

“Now that Friendster.com is available in Vietnamese, the entire country of Vietnam can now visit and use Friendster, see who’s on Friendster, invite their friends, and start using Friendster to express themselves and share and communicate with friends and family globally.”

In Asia, members use Friendster to find lost friends, keep in touch with friends and family, make new friends, share photos and photo albums, send messages, express themselves through their personalized profile page, write a personal blog, start or participate in a group on a specific topic, become a fan of their favorite artist or celebrity (”Fan Profiles”), post “shoutouts” and bulletins, and use many new features created by third parties via the Friendster Developer Program.

Friendster has implemented multi-language support on a single domain - Friendster.com - to promote communication and interaction among users who speak different languages.

About 79 per cent of active friendster users have friends in more than one country, and 23 per cent of friend connections are between users in different countries.

These cross-border percentages, believed to be the highest of all major social networks, require multi-language support to be implemented in a single, global Web site.

While other social networking sites create separate sites for different countries or languages, Friendster was the first global online social network to employ this single-site approach to allow and encourage multi-cultural exchange and communications - regardless of language - among users around the world.

“Friendster has a large number of bilingual users who would like the choice to enter their content and use the site in either English or Vietnamese, and countless users are looking forward to inviting their friends and family who speak Vietnamese to join them on Friendster,” said Jones.

Users can permanently or temporarily set their language of choice via links at the top right of every page of the Friendster.com Web site or via the “Settings” link.

Friendster Leads in Asia

Friendster is the No. 1 social network in Asia, with over 50 million registered users and 34 million monthly unique visitors from Asia.(1) In Asia, Friendster is more than twice the size of any other social network. While Friendster has over 34 million monthly unique visitors in Asia, Facebook has 16 million, MySpace.com and MySpace.cn have only 15 million combined, Mixi (Japan) has 14 million, CyWorld (Korea) has 13 million, Hi5 has 12 million, Orkut has 10 million, Xiaonei (China) has 7 million, 51.com (China) has 7 million, and Bebo has 4 million.(1)

Friendster - A Top 10 Website Globally

Friendster is the 8th-largest Web site and the 3rd largest social network in the world in terms of traffic, and #1 in user engagement - time spent on site - among top social networks.

Friendster now has 68 million registered users and 39 million monthly unique visitors. Friendster continued its healthy growth by adding another 2 million monthly unique visitors in March and 9 million monthly unique visitors in the last 3 months.(1)

About Friendster

With more than 70 million members worldwide, Friendster is a leading global online social network. Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them.

Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, social groups, activities and interests.

Friendster prides itself in delivering an easy-to-use, friendly and interactive environment where users can easily connect with anyone around the world.

Friendster has a growing portfolio of patents granted to the company on social networking, with more expected over the next several months.

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and individual investors. For more information, visit: http://www.friendster.com.

(1) comScore Media Metrix, March 2008

SOURCE: Friendster, Inc.
CONTACT: Lerin O’Neill of The Hoffman Agency,
+1-408-975-3037, press@friendster.com, for Friendster
Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh 20080515/AQTH053
PRN Photo Desk, photodesk@prnewswire.com
Web site: http://www.friendster.com

Comcast Corp has agreed to acquire pioneering Web start-up Plaxo Inc, which first sought to turn address books into social networks and laid the foundation for Friendster and Facebook.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

However, a source close to the deal said Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV operator and a leading U.S. broadband Internet supplier, is paying “around $175 million, plus or minus 5 percent.”

Plaxo is famous in Silicon Valley lore for being early to realize the potential business opportunities sitting latent in the online address books of e-mail users—but only belatedly jumping on the social network craze that soon followed.

Comcast plans to use Plaxo to give its consumers social network links across all Comcast-connected devices including TVs, digital video recorders and, eventually, wireless devices, thanks to a new partnership with Sprint, Clearwire and Google.

Plaxo will join its fast-growing Comcast Interactive Media unit which includes Comcast.net, video entertainment site Fancast, movie site Fandango and theplatform, an online video delivery site.

It seems a given that mobile social networking is going to be “the next big thing”, but squinting at tiny text is still a pain on today’s phones. To deal with this issue, Blabnote, a British startup that is currently in private beta, has created what may be the world’s first “vocal social network.”

To login to the network, you simply call Blabnote from your phone, which uses caller ID to match you to your profile. From there, you can vocally enter any number of commands. For example, if I wanted to create a group for TechCrunch fans, I might say, “Create Group called ‘Team TechCrunch’”. Members can be added by saying, “add Mike and Mark”, and you can send messages to group members in a similar fashion.

Blabnote has no shortage of obstacles to overcome, to put it mildly. For one, the entire system is going to rely on voice recognition, which isn’t exactly a perfected technology. Imagine creating a very personal voice message and sending it to an ex-girlfriend on accident - the setup is ripe for disaster. And should you get sick of talking (and listening), you’re out of luck: there is no web management interface, though Blabnote says it will provide an API for third parties.

Blabnote could be a useful organization and notification tool for established groups, like soccer teams or clubs. But if it aspires to become a large social network, this company is going to be teetering perilously close to the DeadPool.