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Leading enterprise social software vendor Socialtext announced today v5.0 of their service that updates their user interface and packs a bunch of new features. In addition, they have released SocialRadar, a people recommendation and profiling engine that identifies the most relevant people to connect with and solve business challenges together in real-time. V5 also includes a simplified content editor along with a theme selector and other UI enhancements. It is available now.

Facebook allows users of its social networking site to comment on its pages without Liking them now.

This is a step in a direction that might make advertisers, brand managers and marketing people feel a little uneasy, because it means they may have to start thinking deeply for their brand rather than just counting hits.

For the first time ever, 50% of all American adults are using social networking sites, according to new data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Of active Internet users in particular, 65% are social networking users, a number that continues to climb. To put things in perspective, only 29% of adult American Internet users reported using social networking tools in 2008.

Inmagic is launching an idea management system called IdeaNet this week, claiming to deliver the "right mix of culture, process, and tools to support open and fluid lines of communication across organizational communities and silos." That's quite a mouthful, not to mention a lot of Big Ideas right there.

Companies clamoring to build a presence on Google's new social network have a few more months to wait. Business profiles are coming to Google Plus around the third quarter of this year, according to a story on VentureBeat.

While Google hasn't revealed many details about what the brand profiles will include, a Google representative told VentureBeat that users should expect "a level of analytics and measurement that you'd typically find in Google products," hinting at the inclusion of analytics in business accounts.

Mobile developers can now add in-app social networking features to their mobile applications using a new software development kit (SDK) from Socialize, Inc. Once intergrated, the app's users can find and connect with each other based on similar interests and can also push some of the app's content to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, or, for those who like it old-school, email.

MySpace's fall from glory is now complete; Kara Swisher reports that it has been sold off to an advertising network for $35 million, an incredible decline in value from the $580 million that Newscorp paid for the social network in 2005.

Why did MySpace fail? Why have Facebook and Twitter stolen its thunder? That will be a question for the ages, but one contributing factor may be the incredible hostility that MySpace had for outside application developers. MySpace thought, and said publicly, that all the rest of Web 2.0 was a leach, a monkey on MySpace's back. Below, an excerpt from a TechCrunch post I wrote about this five years ago. It looks pretty amazing now in retrospect and is a good reminder that today's leading companies should remember their humility.

With a number of news stories lately about kids under 13 on Facebook (on the site against the social network's terms of service), you'd think there weren't any other social networking sites that were geared for kids or where kids wanted to be. That's hardly the case, as there are many social networks, gaming sites and virtual worlds aimed at the under 13 set. In fact, a study last year suggested that of the billion some-odd users of virtual worlds, over half are under age 15.

One of the newest kid-friendly sites is MiniMonos, a New Zealand-based company that, just six months after its launch, already has over 250,000 users. That's dwarfed, of course, by the popular Disney-owned Club Penguin, with over 6 million monthly active users. While MiniMonos is similar to Club Penguin and other virtual sites with its emphasis on fun avatars, games, and virtual goods, MiniMonos, which means "little monkeys" in Spanish, is unique in a couple of ways.

The enterprise microblogging and discussion marketplace continues to evolve, as this week TheFlowr.com announced new features and pricing. As we have covered in the past, Socialcast has been acquired by VMware, Yammer has partnered with Netsuite, and a number of traditional enterprise vendors are putting forth their own offerings in this market too.

A special report from Spectrum, the journal of IEEE, is well worth a closer look to see where its writers see the Web evolving.

It contains, first and foremost, a series of articles on how the Internet and other technologies have changed how we work and relate to each other. There are a number of articles that compare Google and Facebook in different dimensions: how their data centers differ from ordinary data centers, what it is like to work at their Valley HQ campuses (although Facebook will be moving to a new facility later this year).