ReadWriteWeb

Over the past year, we've been inundated with social media. We've seen Twitter go mainstream, lifestreaming take over blogging, and we've tried what felt like a million different applications. We've joined then abandoned new services recklessly, leaving our accounts to wither away on platforms long forgotten. What more could we possibly do in 2009?

Even in this age of social media, browsing the web is still a solitary activity, even though a couple of services like Socialbrowse, Kiobo, or Me.dium have tried to to turn browsing into a more social experience.

Another social browsing service we like a lot is Browzmi. When we first looked at Browzmi earlier this year, it was basically a browser inside of a browser, which was a cool technical achievement, but the experience was held back by the fact that you had to log in to the service and use Browzmi's own bookmarking service. Now, a newly released Firefox extension replaces the 'browser within a browser' and greatly enhances the social surfing experience.

Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Folwer recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal where they examined how a person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends in their offline social networks. To follow up that study, they examined those same happiness clusters in online networks like MySpace and Facebook. Their conclusion? Happier people tend to have more friends and are more central to the network when compared with their more sullen friends.

"Koobface" is the name of the Trojan worm that's been making its way through the social networking site Facebook lately, but to the site's users, it's been simply known as "the Facebook virus." That name will soon become a misnomer, though, because the worm is now spreading outside of Facebook's walls to attack other social networks like Bebo, MySpace, Friendster, MyYearbook, and Blackplanet.

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we took an in-depth look at the emerging world of open social networks. We pondered: which of Facebook Connect and OpenID will be more successful? And we explained why "distributed social networking" is a trend to watch, with projects such as DiSo and OpenSocial. Also this week we examined the latest in online anonymity and education 2.0. On the product side, we began our 'Best Products 2008' series with our selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products of the year. We also told you about some of our favorite apps to show new users and we reviewed the latest Nokia internet phone. Last but not least, check the latest from Jobwire - our new product that tracks hires in tech and new media.

Forget losing your job, apparently your MySpace or Facebook profile and photos can now cause you to lose your degree. In what may be one of the most frightening rulings regarding social networks and privacy to date, a federal judge has ruled against a former student of Millersville University of Pennsylvania who was denied her college degree because of an unseemly online photo and its accompanying caption found on her social network profile.

Distributed social networking - where users can connect their profile, friends and other data across multiple sites - is still a relatively new concept and not fully developed. There are plenty of companies and projects vying to be a major piece of the distributed social networking puzzle. The big Internet companies have initiatives such as OpenSocial (Google), Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, Yahoo! Open Strategy. There are also smaller company and open source projects such as DiSo and Noserub (we explain these below).

Imagine TweetDeck as an online application. Now imagine that you could use its paneled dashboard interface to keep tabs on your other online identities, too. With PeopleBrowsr, you can. This new application, currently in alpha, lets you update your networks, follow your friends, organize your favorites, and search for content across networks that include Twitter, flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Seesmic, identi.ca, Photobucket, upcoming, and FriendFeed.

It seems we're approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead being anonymous, faceless IP addresses, social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the "real" world and the "virtual" world to blur. Web 2.0 helped create a world where your identity is revealed in bits and pieces as you share snippets of your life online - a photo here, a Stumble there, a tweet, a Digg, etc. However, the rise of social media is only one of the changes that is busy shaping the new web.

FileRide is a Stockholm-based social network with a twist: FileRide creates a social network for you, based around the files that are already on your computer. FileRide, for example, lets you see who else on the services has the same song or image on their computers and lets you add them as friends. Even more interestingly, you can then also add comments to these files and chat about them in real-time. It is important to note, however, that FileRide is not a file-sharing network and that you can't tranfer files through the service. FileRide's client software currently only works on XP and Vista, but OS X and mobile versions are already in development.