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This week there has been a slew of news about social networks and big companies ramping up their social software features. Here's a quick summary of the latest news and

Mercora, which last year renamed itself to Social.fm, was one of the earliest entrants into the music discovery market and launched to generally favorable reviews in early 2005. Now, however,

It's here! It's clear! It's the apply named AppUseful, the Yelp of social media applications. Just login with your AppUseful account or with Facebook Connect, and you're magically transformed from

Ning, the popular online service that allows users to create their own custom social networking sites, launched Ning Apps today. Ning Apps gives users the ability to embed over 90

Online reputation company Rapleaf has released a new study of 49.3 million people, revealing gender and age data about social network users. On most of the main social networks -

Traditionally, political participation has always been highly correlated with income and education. According to a new report (PDF), this is still holds true for those who participate in political activities

Google's OpenSocial has caused quite a stir over the past week. With support from MySpace, Hi5, Ning, LinkedIn, SalesForce, Friendster and a number of other large social networks, many have

Recently, there have been a few conflicting reports about the current popularity of social networks here in the U.S. On one hand, you have reports that point toward the growth

This week saw Facebook Connect open its doors to the broader world, on the same day that Google Friend Connect launched its public beta. This was the kind of day

Even though baby boomers make up more than one quarter of all US Internet users, and even though the majority of this group spends over five hour per week online,