ReadWriteWeb

In the late 90's, a spokesperson for the Coca Cola corporation said, "Our primary competition isn't Pepsi. Our real competition is water, tea, nimbupani and Pepsi... in that order."

While it's a gruesome thought to see water considered competition to the top cola manufacturer, I didn't include the quote to make a commentary on public health or privatization. I did it to remind startups that competition includes all products that solve the same problem, in this case - thirst. When a startup claims they have no competitors, it makes me wonder if there's a need for their product in the first place. You have competitors. Below are a few ways you can find them, research them and then beat them.

Everybody is getting in the game. Google just announced Buzz, its social feed add-on to Gmail, last week and today Microsoft is bringing the feed to Outlook. Microsoft first announced its social media add-on, the Outlook Social Connector, last November but today begins the public beta period for LinkedIn for Outlook. The company has also announced partnerships with Facebook and Myspace.

As more of the business world flattens with the expansion of online services, social networking is increasingly becoming a critical factor to success in many industries. Whether you're for a small businesses selling art at a craft fair or a Fortune 500 company trading on the stock exchange, social networking has the power to expand your brand among both your audience and fellow business owners. For the latter, entrepreneurs can take advantage of specialized social networks to meet, communicate share and partner with others.

Florida-based entrepreneur, business consultant and blogger Matthew Ringer recently posted an extensive list of the his top 40 Social Networking Sites Specifically for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, and Startups on his site Small Biz Bee. The list is an excellent resource for anyone looking to expand their professional network, but for those looking for a quick dose of business social networking, here are profiles of three great sites from Ringer's list for connecting with entrepreneurs.

Web technology that replicates clunky, analog methods for organizing and interacting with information is a terrible practice and we're glad to see one more example of it departing the Internet with LinkedIn's new address book functionality hitting the site today.

While still in beta, the new function looks like a leap ahead of the old Rolodex-style functionality we've become used to never using.

Whether we're tweeting the minutiae of our daily lives from our cell phones, checking out the latest band pages on Myspace, chatting with friends on Facebook, looking up old high school buddies on Classmates or networking with colleagues on LinkedIn, we're spending more and more time on social networking sites than ever before. Leading the pack, of course, are the usual suspects: Facebook and Twitter.

As a matter of fact, according to Nielsen, we're spending 82% more time on social networking sites than we did just a year earlier.

In November of last year, more than 50 people came together for Startup Weekend Los Angeles. They pitched 45 different entrepreneurial ideas, eventually narrowing them into seven teams. They spent Saturday and Sunday working around the clock to create working prototypes of these ideas with help from an expert panel of mentors, speakers and even lawyers.

Then they voted, and the top vote-getter - Mingly - was born, and has since been invited to Twiistup, a showcase for hot upcoming startups in Los Angeles at the end of January.

Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.

The new app looks a lot like a less elegant, less customizable version of the Facebook iPhone app. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company's mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social-media-messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you're looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post. Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it's a work in progress and will improve soon.

TweetDeck, the most popular third-party Twitter client on the market today, just got a major update. TweetDeck now features support for Twitter lists and Twitter's new geolocation feature, as well as a LinkedIn column and optional support for Twitter's new retweet function. Users who prefer to use old-style retweets can still use these as well. For now, TweetDeck geolocation feature doesn't allow you to update your location from the desktop. This feature will soon be part of TweetDeck's iPhone app, which will be updated in the next few weeks.

A while back, a friend of mine wondered about LinkedIn's somewhat limited options for indicating how you know someone. ("I vomited on their shoes at the office party" isn't on the list, for example.) We had a back-and-forth on her blog, and I came up with a list of some potentially useful additions to LinkedIn's categories.

You'll find them below... but they're only a starting point. Kindly add yours in the comments, and maybe - just maybe - they'll be coming soon to a form field near you.

It's only late afternoon and we've already got a Thanksgiving mystery. API strategist Ben Metcalfe and former SVP of Marketing for Tesla Motors Plato's Forms. The duo are intent on "solving the problem of rapid proliferation of misinformation in online media." Although their recent blog post confirms the company's $545,000 dollars in new funding, they are keeping mum on product specifics and how they'll transform media in Spring 2010. In our commitment to truth, justice and better blogging, ReadWriteWeb has a list of issues we hope Plato's Forms addresses: