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At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston today, Microsoft announced a roadmap and pricing for a number of online software packages for the enterprise and small business market. Microsoft Online Services is currently available in a limited beta and will come in two flavors: Business Productivity Online Standard Suite for $15 a seat, and a Deskless Worker Suite for $3 a seat.

Staff of Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world Second Life, and IBM announced last night that they have achieved the first recorded teleport of their avatars from one virtual world into another. Researchers from the two companies teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world.

While unaffiliated parties have created versions of this process before, Linden says theirs is the first effort to achieve trans-world teleportation without logging out of one world and logging in to the other. No virtual goods were transported across the barrier, a major concern for Second Lifers concerned with virtual property theft and rapid depreciation of their assets' value.

According to a new report, over the past 12 months more than four-fifths of social networking site users said that they had received unwanted friend requests, messages, or posts on their social or professional network profile. While friend requests on their own seem innocuous enough, they are often just the first step towards whatever the spammers' intended malicious activity is, be it redirects to phishing or malware sites or even just unsolicited advertisements.

New Zealand will be the first country in the world to get the Apple iPhone 3G, because of the country's position on the international dateline. Vodafone NZ is the carrier which is offering the iPhone, but its pricing plans - released today - have attracted a storm of criticism. Vodafone NZ has decided to charge extortionist prices for the iPhone 3G. Kiwis (including yours truly) are naturally outraged.

Today we're announcing a new feature for our community: ReadWriteWeb Predictions, a Predictions Center powered by Predictify. We hope it will enable you to tap into the collective intelligence of RWW readers, to assess web technology trends and keep one step ahead of the news.

The first prediction is about the battle for users and mind-share that has emerged this year between Twitter and FriendFeed.

Well placed rumor has it that microblogging service Twitter has acquired search engine Summize. Jason Calacanis appears to have made the first public statement about it, though it may have been blogger Josh Chandler as well. We'd put less stock in were it not that Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is getting positive signals on the deal and would not likely have pulled the trigger on the story were it nothing but a fleeting rumor.

Summize is one of the most interesting services on the web today, both for its feature set and its history. Started as an academic research project by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Summize is today headquartered in Virginia. Chowdhury was the AOL employee who posted 650,000 AOL customers' search queries for researchers to analyze in 2006 - kicking off a storm of debate about data privacy that still rages today.

Wikipedia is an incredible monument to human creativity and collaboration, but as one era of innovation passes into another - semantic web advocates want to augment the huge human input into the web with machine learning. The semantically enriched common database Freebase announced today that it will soon reach the milestone of 4 million topics added to its collection. That's 60% more than English Wikipedia's 2,445,041 articles and almost half the size of Wikipedia's full 10 million articles in 250 different languages.

What is Freebase? It's a database of information that's organized by people and machines and is particularly well suited for machine reading. You're not a machine - so why should you care? Read on.

In the competitive social news market, Digg has gotten a lot of attention for its recommendation engine and Mixx continues to release new features (it has launched communities and an API recently). However it seems like Reddit is not getting the attention it deserves. Its open source initiative was well received, but there are other interesting aspects to Reddit.

Here's a look at why the idea of a social news site front page that is newspaper-like and presents information in reverse chronological presentation has to change - and how Reddit is flirting with the answer.

Lifestream.fm came onto the scene back in April of this year and was soon acquired by (once politically incorrect) social bookmarking company, Mister Wong. At the time of their launch, Lifestream.fm looked like just another attempt to compete with social media darling FriendFeed, and one that didn't really offer anything too special. But now that the service is under new ownership, they've been busy recoding, adding features, and fixing bugs. But have they done enough to warrant a second look?