ReadWriteWeb

A new report released today by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.

Nick O'Neil has the scoop on a new Facebook feature that asks members to suggest friends for new users. The feature is a refinement of the "people you may know" feature that Facebook quietly launched in March. Because new users don't have many connections, the "people you may know" feature has no friends to draw upon (since it works by seeing who you are connected to by degrees through current friends). This new feature relies on human suggestions from the few friends new users do have to fill in the gaps for new users.

SocialVibe is an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity. Users compete for status and prizes by shilling for their favorite brands, while a cut of the proceeds goes to a charity of their choice. The more popular you are on social networks or elsewhere on the web (for example, if you author a popular blog) the more money you can raise for charity and the more chances you can earn to win prizes.

Git is a decentralized version control system created by Linus Torvalds that is used by a number of open source projects, most notably perhaps the Linux kernel. GitHub is a new hosted Git repository service that's being called a "social network" for programmers and with good reason. It also already has some high profile projects of its own on board: Ruby on Rails, Capistrano, Merb, Prototype and Scriptaculous, among others. "[GitHub is] the way SourceForge should have been," gushed one beta tester.

When MySpace first launched, one of its main draws was the music offered by independent artists on the site, something which generated a strong following among new musicians and their friends. These young artists were using the platform as a way to get their name out there, share their tunes, and attract a fan base.

Hype Machine, the much-loved MP3 blog aggregator service, has long been the place to go to find great tracks and music reviews on the net. In October of last year, the site got a big makeover, which included new social networking features like user profiles where you could list your favorite blogs, bands, searches, and friends. Now, Hype Machine has taken the social aspect a step further with their revamped Dashboard section, which introduces social scrobbling features, just like Last.FM offers, along with other new features and an updated layout.

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?

Groundbreaking social network LiveJournal is no longer allowing new users to sign up for Basic level accounts, which traded a pared-down feature set for an ad and cost free user profile.

SUP, the Russian company that recently acquired LiveJournal, angered a substantial number of its users last week by instituting the policy before discussing it publicly and going against the advice of at least two members of the company's new high profile advisory committee.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. This week includes social networks and lifestreaming analysis (Facebook, FeedFriend and more), a look at new Semantic Apps, and a new service from Amazon. And don't forget to click through to our website and leave a comment on our posts, for a chance to win a daily $30 Amazon gift voucher.

The Internet has made our personal lives public. Thanks to social networks, the kind of public scrutiny that was once reserved for the very famous, is now possible for many of us. As we wrote last month, social networking sites like Facebook have become your "permanent record" on the Internet, and that privacy on the web is just an illusion. But do employees even have a legitimate reason for looking at your social networking profiles and other information on the web when hiring you? Is that fair?