ReadWriteWeb

This morning Canadian startup accelerator Bootup Labs showcased some of its program graduates at Plug and Play Center's Sunnyvale location. While a number of the companies show promise, it was a gaming product that caught our attention. DimeRocker is offering developers a chance to elevate the level of gaming experiences and monetization on sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo.

Today, the white label application builder called LOLapps emerged from stealth mode to announce that they now have 44 million unique visitors using their tools. The company has been operating since early 2008, allowing users to create both quizzes and gifts on social networking platforms like Bebo, Facebook, and others. A user-generated content builder like this may seem like no big deal, but for LOLapps, it's big business.

Bebo, AOL's social network, added a lifestreaming feature today that allows users to pull in updates from Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious, as well as from Facebook and Myspace. Bebo also introduced another new feature called 'Lifestory,' which displays your updates in a scrollable and zoomable timeline that is somewhat reminiscent of ThisMoment. With LifeStory, you can quickly create new events on your timeline and add photos, videos, and text. This feature, however, is not integrated with your lifestream.

Earlier this week, we were lamenting about Bebo's lack of innovation in the online social networking space. Here it was 2009 and they were only just now releasing tools that would help take Bebo mobile. Once again, it looked like Bebo was following the industry leaders...and doing so far too late. But now it seems Bebo may have something up their sleeve that's going to make us eat our words. Apparently, the company is planning a major reinvention of their social network which may have us giving them a second look.

Today, social networking site Bebo announced a new partnership program called "Bebo Open Mobile" whose goal is to provide the mobile industry with tools designed to help integrate the site and its services into manufacturers' handsets. At the current time, the Bebo Mobile offering includes three distinct components: Bebo Open Mobile Internet, Bebo Open Mobile Messaging, and the Bebo Open Mobile Development API.

In the US, sending SMS messages can get spendy. In the rest of the world, however, texting costs can be downright oppressive. As such, finding cheaper ways to send SMS messages has a broad appeal - especially with the younger, and often cash-strapped, set.

With the release of Utterli Free Group Texting, Utterli - formerly known as Utterz - is hoping to tap into that market, offering the ability to send SMS messages to friends - and groups of friends - for free from within Facebook or Bebo. And, free is a very good price.

Mobile social networking company Frengo has released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending support for the Open Social and Facebook platforms to the mobile phone, the Frengo toolkit allows developers to monetize applications via the company's social advertising platform or via premium SMS.

A month ago, ReadWriteWeb writer Marshall Kirkpatrick utilized his huge network of Twitter followers to facilitate a discussion about APIs and platforms. He shared the highlights of the conversation in a post on this blog. The discussion was one that really captured our imaginations, so today we're exploring the issue further and presenting 5 dynamics that you should consider when picking a platform.

LiveBook is a new collaborative writing project that aims to write two separate novels via applications on two different social networks: one on Facebook, the other on Bebo. The Facebook novel, "Helen and her Facebook" chronicles a girl named Helen who has just recently signed up on the social network, while the Bebo version, "Brian from Bebo," follows the similar tale, though this time it's a boy and Bebo. The stories are written sentence by sentence by the members each network with no outside editorial influence, though co-founder Dmitry Honcharenko thinks there exists the possibility for the two books to reference each other and for Helen and Brian to meet.

Microsoft announced a partnership this morning with five social networks on data portability. Starting today, users on Facebook and Bebo will be able to add friends via their Windows Live address book. The functionality will be coming to Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn in the next few months. Microsoft is calling this a "two-way street" and has launched a new site, invite2messenger.net, where users can invite friends from those networks to chat on Live Messenger.