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Last week, Diaspora, the open-source, privacy-aware social network of our nerdy dreams, posted its first public response to the launch of Google Plus and the recent efforts around privacy and selective sharing at Facebook. For a reaction to news that two Web behemoths are drinking Diaspora's milkshake in terms of features, the blog post sounds pretty upbeat, with perhaps just a hint of caginess. "We're proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles," the Diaspora team writes. "We're making a difference already."

Let's not get into whether Diaspora can take credit for features of Google Plus and Facebook. There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it's decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered.

Yammer, one of our favorite enterprise microblogging tools, has been busy enhancing its services. There are two worthy items today: first is integration with On24's webinar network, and the second is the ability to do work with Salesforce.com. Together they show how the company is trying its best to integrate with anyone and everyone it can to spread its reach.

LinkedIn is considering building a social networking tool for the workplace, along the lines of Yammer and similar tools, CEO Jeff Weiner said in the company's first earnings call earlier today.

If it does so, LinkedIn will be competing with dozens of other companies, including IBM, Jive, Microsoft (which has some social networking capabilities built into SharePoint), Socialtext TIBCO and VMware (which recently acquired SocialCast). And as we've mentioned, some see Google Plus eventually being a workplace tool as part of Google Apps.

With so many options already on the market, are you interested in the idea of using LinkedIn as an internal social network?

There seem to be three forces at play when it comes to education and social media. The first is a lack of force, quite frankly - the inertia that makes many educators unwilling and uninterested in integrating the technology into their classrooms. The second is the force of fear - the pressures on the part of administrators, district officials, and politicians to curtail and ban teacher and students' interactions online. (See Rhode Island's recently passed legislation that outlaws all social media on school grounds as a case in point.) And finally, the third force is that of more and more educators who are embracing social media and advocating its use on- and off-campus - for student learning and for teacher professional development alike.

I spent this past week with many of those teachers at the International Society for Technology in Education conference in Philadelphia, and when Google unveiled Google+ on Tuesday, most of us were otherwise preoccupied. But now that many of the early tech adopter teachers are getting their Google+ invites, the question on their minds is "How will this work for education?"

These days, a lot of folks are looking for a job, and after the LinkedIn IPO, job seeking tools are back in the spotlight. A Facebook App called BranchOut grew from 30,000 to more than 800,000 users in a matter of days last week, especially without any marketing hoopla, constructing virtual farm land or attacking angry avians.

Friendster, one of the original players in the social networking arena, is changing the nature of its business to focus more on games and entertainment. Hence, all profile data that Friendster has been saving over the years will be deleted as of May 31, 2011, according to reports.

Want to save some personal history? Your old profile information, as well as your comments, pictures, messages, blogs and groups, can be extracted using the Friendster Exporter.

Of the major categories of NoSQL databases - document-oriented databases, key-value stores and graph databases - we've given the least attention to graph databases on this blog. That's a shame, because as many have pointed out it may become the most significant category.

Graph databases apply graph theory to the storage of information about the relationships between entries. The relationships between people in social networks is the most obvious example. The relationships between items and attributes in recommendation engines is another. Yes, it has been noted by many that it's ironic that relational databases aren't good for storing relationship data. Adam Wiggins from Heroku has a lucid explanation of why that is here. Short version: among other things, relationship queries in RDBSes can be complex, slow and unpredictable. Since graph databases are designed for this sort of thing, the queries are more reliable.

Google has its own graph computing system called Pregel (you can find the paper on the subject here), but there are several commercial and open source graph databases available. Let's look at a few.

Editor's note: This is the first in a three-part series by Alex Korth on privacy. In the next post, he will cover problem areas that originate from provider goals and market mechanics.

To date, we witness the mass adoption of social networks. Roughly every 10th citizen of this planet uses these services to communicate with others. For the satisfaction of human need like socialization and self-esteem, users visit these services - very often more than daily. In communication, regardless of online or offline, people put their privacies at risk for some benefit.

In the offline world, we learned since our childhood how to do this properly with respect to the culture we live in. We learned how physics of the world around us work: We know when spoken word is recorded or who can see us communicating with someone. For most given communication situations, we perceive a level of transparency by sensoring the surroundings to control the receivers for what we want to say.

Today Jive Software announced its acquisition of Proximal Labs, a social network analytics company. Prior to the acquisition, Jive was a customer of Proximal Labs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Proximal Labs co-founder and CEO David Gutelius is joining Jive as Chief Social Scientist.

Jive will use Proximal's machine learning technology, powered by Apache Hadoop, to help its users apply complex analytics to their enterprise social graphs. Example use cases include locating subject matter experts both inside and outside the firewall or surfacing relevant content within the network. The company is calling the platform "Jive What Matters."