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There was a lot of chatter over the weekend about folk punk rocker Billy Bragg's New York Times editorial where he argues that music artists who uploaded material to social network Bebo were entitled to a cut of the site's $850 million sale price. Because bebo owes much of its success to becoming an indy music hub, that seems reasonable, right? Bragg says this is a case of artists’ rights. Certainly, artists deserve to be compensated for their work, but if you willfully put it online for free, can you really lay claim to revenue later that was never part of the argreement?

Are you into multimedia? Do you stream music over the web, share photos on Flickr and Picassa, watch videos at YouTube, share links with friends, and hang out in social networks? A new startup from Ubuket wants to help make access to your content from anywhere even easier. The service they provide will let you access all your media from your desktop, social network, blog, or even your mobile device.

The big news today is that US portal giant AOL acquired leading social networking site Bebo for $850 million. There has been a lot of coverage about the business aspects of this deal, but from a product view I don't think this will make much headway for either company. Bebo is a distant third to MySpace and Facebook in the social network market (especially in the key US market), while AOL is a perennial also-ran nowadays when compared to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. While this deal will see innovations such as AIM integrating with Bebo (Whoa! Real-time Social Networking!), let's look at the bigger picture. Ultimately we're talking about two middle of the road Web brands.

Following the December announcement that social network Bebo was aligning itself to the Facebook platform, the company announced today that the Bebo Open Application Platform is "100% open" – meaning that any 3rd party developer can deploy their applications on Bebo.

Previously the Bebo platform was only available to a select group of media and developer partners, including NBC Universal, CBS, NBA, Yahoo!, RockYou, Slide, and others. As of now, there are 63 apps in their Developer website - Bebo obviously hopes to ramp this up quickly now that anyone can develop apps.

The OpenSocial team at Google today announced an updated JavaScript API. While the actual content of the update is rather technical, Google engineer Cassie Doll says that it addresses "the most immediate pain points" for developers. But the big albatross around OpenSocial's neck is the question of just what MySpace is going to do.