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Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. It's as simple as that. The site, which is targeted at an international audience, is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. You can create a username and password for the site, or login using Facebook Connect. My-ArtMap is also available as an iPhone app.

Picture a full-screen Facebook news feed filled with all the beautifully designed items that all your aesthetically inclined friends have purchased. Now clean up the user interface so there's no spammy news ticker. Got it?

Then you have arrived at Fab.com, the Web's fastest growing flash sales site specializing in design. Today it launched an irresistible (and I do not use this word lightly) new feature it likes to call Live Feed, which uncreepily surfaces what other Fab.com members are buying, liking, tweeting and sharing across the Web. Unlike Facebook's opt-out privacy features, Fab.com made the live feed on this new feature completely opt-in. You can choose to reveal your username whenever you purchase something, or not. If you don't want other Fab.com members to see what you've purchased, you'll just be known anonymously as "A Fab User."

These days there really is a social network for everything. Formspring.me is centered around asking questions and receiving answers. Quora is focused on exchanging knowledge. Favo.rs is a new social network that hopes to build online community around a single concept: founders and professionals can gather here and offer each other help. It's so simple that it just might work. Serial entrepreneur Adam Rodnitzky co-founded Favo.rs, which is focused on entrepreneurs, small business people and independent workers who don't have the benefit of a large company's built-in network.

Every good social network has a focus and a purpose. Facebook helps you keep up with friends you more or less know in real-life. Twitter is perfect for following news feeds and celebrities. LinkedIn connects you to the folks you'd rather only know professionally.

But what about the people in your real-life, honest-to-goodness neighborhood?

Enter Nextdoor, a Menlo Park, California-based startup that launched earlier today. The platform gives neighbors in specific regions the opportunity to create private websites for exchanging local information and events.

We've been watching with some interest - shall we say - as AOL attempts to secretly prepare for a MapQuest social network called mqVibe. It hasn't been announced yet, but we've been able to connect enough dots to figure out that it's a neighborhood social and business network. UPDATE: And it launches tomorrow.

Our intrepid gumshoe at Fusible.com has poked around some more, and now we have specifics about the kinds of features we can expect to see on mqVibe. It will sport tight Facebook integration, and it will combine reviews and popularity votes on neighborhoods and businesses into a "vibe score." AOL really is going to take a shot at Google Places and Yelp.

Experian Hitwise has released some new numbers about social network use around the world. It found that Brazil and Singapore are the top two countries for overall social networking use. But Facebook is not the network on which Brazilians are spending their time.

The study also measured the length of the average user's Facebook session and found that Brazilians spent comparatively little time on Facebook. While Singapore users spend nearly nearly 39 minutes per Facebook session on average, Brazilian users spend less than half that, just over 18 minutes.

Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month.

Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?

Something cool is coming to your neighborhood. AOL appears to be preparing us for some kind of neighborhood-based social network built around MapQuest (remember them?). It has registered a bunch of domains this year that all point to a page that says something called "mqVibe" is coming soon.

Earlier this month, we reported on a slew of domain name purchases and trademark applications that indicated some kind of AOL social network was in the works. At the time, we figured it could have just been speculative. But no, it looks like AOL is serious. MapQuest will be the hub of AOL's effort to get on the social networking map.

Overwhelmed by new features? Tickers? Open Graphs? What about Hangouts and Circles? Well, Twitter doesn't have those things. Twitter still exists because it's not going bananas with new features all the time. There's no room. Hell, it only got photo albums a month ago. Everyone's always worried about how Twitter has only 140 characters. Well, Facebook allows 5,000 now. Isn't that a little worrisome, too? Facebook keeps track of your whole life now. Tweets fall off a cliff after a couple days. Doesn't that sound nice at this point?

Today is Friday, and on Twitter that means it's #FollowFriday. It's a hashtag holiday that's all about sharing people. There are no algorithms, no "People You May Know" (well, those are in the sidebar, but ignore them). It's just a real social gathering on the Web at the end of every week. #FollowFriday is a much maligned phenomenon, but it's just misunderstood. Read on to find out how #FollowFriday really works.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be giving $10,000 grants to Newark teachers who come up with innovative programs as a part of the $100 million fund he set up with the City of Newark last year.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker announced the grants on his Facebook page this morning, signaling what the city hopes is beginning of a long-running process to build a Web tech presence, and improve teaching into the city's school system.