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Forget credit cards and social security numbers, a new lot of identity thieves will soon come after your web profiles, or says security firm Aladdin in their Annual Threat Report. According to the firm, if you don't own and control your online persona, it's relatively easy for a criminal to aggregate the known public information about you in order to create a fake one.

Long time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.

So far it's just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.

The race to find a single sign-on and synchronization service has been on since social networking sites hit global acceptance several years ago. Today, after working under the radar for the past year, and with a member base of 5 million users, Power.com announced its global launch with a mighty claim: "Our platform will break down the boundaries between social sites and allow users to synchronize their logins, content, messages and friends."

Calling it a 'social inter-networking' service, CEO Steve Vachani today explained: "Social is about people, not about place; we're making 'where' irrelevant."

Microsoft just announced the availability of a number of new and updated online applications in its Windows Live suite: Windows Live Photos, Profiles, People, and Groups. In addition, Microsoft also announced that it will allow its users to integrate content from a large number third-party services, including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, StumbleUpon, TripIt, Twitter, and Yelp. Microsoft will begin rolling out these new services to U.S. customers in the coming weeks and expects them to be available globally in 54 countries by early 2009.

When Google radically changed its iGoogle homepage a little while ago, many of its users were up in arms about these changes. By updating its homepage today, AOL ran a similar risk, but instead of making radical changes to the design of the page, AOL managed to include a lot of new functionality on the new homepage without shocking its users with a completely new layout. The new features of the AOL homepage are mostly centered around adding support for third-party social networking services.

Do you like to know what sort of music, movies, books, and other things your friends like? If so, you have a couple of options for following your friends' interests on the web today. You can either join a social network dedicated to sharing this information (think Goodreads, Flixster, Last.fm) or you can follow your friends on lifestreaming service like FriendFeed where you might happen upon a shared interest somewhere in their stream of updates. A third option would be to only see your friends' interests in context when you were actively viewing a book, movie, album, etc. on the web.

The fact that 10% of users create 90% of user-generated content on any given social media site has become a standard trope in discussions around social media. Because of this gap between mainstream users and the enthusiasts who contribute frequently and tend to dominate the discussion, many companies have decided that participating in online communities is not worth their time, as these companies assume that it doesn't allow them to reach their average consumer. According to a recent study by Rubicon Consulting, however, they do so at their own peril, as these active users are also the most likely to influence their peers' buying decisions.

Students competing to get into the nation's most elite colleges and universities have begun to use sneaky, under-handed tactics involving Facebook, according to a new report from the Chicago Tribune. Via anonymous letters mailed to college admission offices, applicants suggest to admission officers that they check out the photos on a rival's Facebook page before determining whether or not to accept them into the institution. With competition for spots fiercer than ever, the experts cited in that article believe this marks the beginning of a new trend: "Facebook sabotage."

In a world dominated by Facebook and MySpace, one of the best kept secrets in social networking is Multiply.com. This fast growing little social network is about to make a whole lot of new friends.

Microsoft announced today that it will soon close down its 13 year old forum site MSN Groups and it's encouraging its users to export their conversations over to its new official partner, Multiply. It's a big win for one of the most solid social networks online.

GoDaddy has just unveiled an amazing new service called SmartSpace which lets anyone register a domain name and then instantly turn it into a social web site which aggregates any of the following components onto one page: a blog, a photo album, a chat application, email, RSS feeds, and even components from social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn. All you have to do is register the domain name you want and all the technical work is done for you - the site builds itself automatically.