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Demo Day 1, Part 2: Social Networking

No time for coffee, we're jumping straight into social networking.

Diigo: Social annotation (two words that never should have met); you tag pages with your comments, others can find you based on those comments.

Attendi: Find other subject matter experts and chat with them, then take chats and make them persistent. One use mentioned is marketing -- chat immediately with company reps about a product. Hard to see a business model for this one.

RelevantMind: Adds community to product research. Finds existing communities that discuss certain products. Business model is based on partnering the retail outlets, building product pages, and then finding existing Web conversations of those products being used in a variety of ways. Seems useful enough, but of course retailer participation is the tough nut to crack.

VirtualVentures: Virtual venture capitalist game -- they use the wisdom of mobs, err, groups, to pick the best ideas to fund. It's a game, but you don't benefit if you win, the venture fund does. You get a million virtual dollars; if you make virtual money on your investments, your reputation goes up. Since Second Life works, this probably will, too.

Adventa/Ideablob.com: An idea sharing community site that gives away $10K each month to bribe contributers to vet their ideas on Ideablob. Site visitors can vote on ideas. Hmmm. Would you share your million dollar idea here?

Spigit: Adding analytics to social networking. Gives structure to enterprise social networking sites intended for fostering innovation. By capturing the process of evaluating and evolving ideas, the software can analyze the quality of ideas. Includes a pseudo investing system, sort of like virtual ventures. Some enterprises might get some good use out of this for the R&D efforts. Try it as Spigit.com.

Glam Media: Wow, Web 2.0 going to Web 3.0. What could that mean? Well, it's a distributed media platform. Still confused? Me, too. It appears that they're aggregating and classifying content. Then the media is distributed to other sources through widgets. Social ranking happens by subject area experts, somewhat different than digg or slash/dot. Glam calls those experts curators. It's all at Glam.com.

Next comes the games.

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