ReadWriteWeb

Jeff Bezos clearly thinks there is a future in casual gaming. Just this May, he invested $3 million in Kongregate. Today, Bezos invested an undisclosed amount in the Social Gaming Network (SGN), which develops games like Jetman and WarBook for social platforms such as Bebo and Facebook.

This investment from Bezos comes just a few months after SGN raised a $15 million Series A round led by Greylock Partners and the Founders Fund.

Last week, the fight to manage your social data kicked off in earnest as three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend information data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone's guess. We've created an interactive app from Impact Games that will let you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement and share your opinions about what they should do.

Marketing consultant and web connoisseur Noah Brier has launched a simple but fascinating project called BrandTags.net. The idea is that visitors are shown a logo, we respond with a word or very short phrase that we associate with the corresponding brand and then we're given the option to view all the "tags" given a brand in a big tag cloud.

It's a simple but elegant and interesting experiment. The tag cloud for Walmart, for example, shows that the word "evil" is pretty big - but "cheap" is even bigger! We've embedded the site below in an iframe if you want to try it out yourself.

We've all had one of those days when the universe seems to be playing games with us. Things haven't quite worked out all day, there's nothing good on TV, all your friends are out with each other and forgot (didn't want?!) to call you. Even 10 years ago this sort of Friday night would have been lonely. But these days, if you are plugged into the web, you simply cannot be bored!