It’s been a crazy week on the business side of the social networks space.

– Evite joined in.

– Patents are being thrown into the mix.

– Emode changed its name to Tickle and bought Ringo.

– Everyone’s getting money.

– Esther Dyson and the Always On folks had a little discussion (good blog entry by the Spoke folks.

– And, of course, it all got slashdotted

The Social Software Weblog has a lot of the business news so read there if you’re interested in those bits.

Personally, i think it’s great that there is this much interest in the space, but i also find it a bit terrifying. With big players putting their products into the ring and money flowing like it’s 1999, folks are starting to get far more secretive and their plottings feel far less user-centric. Competition is becoming more of a factor that creating cool technology meant to help people. I worry what this will mean long term.

Meanwhile, i think that i will go back to where i started with all of this and focus far more on the users’ understanding of social networks, identity play and articulation.

iTunes Undermines Social Security is a great article on the fashion statement that one makes with one’s collections. For those interested in collections and fashion, make certain to read Fernanda Viegas’ master’s thesis.

I’ve always ranted about how there are two people that no one wants to have access to their digital presentation of self: mom and boss. Apparently, The Onion concurs.

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Check out these visualizations of social networks. They are views of a Hungarian-only online social network community called wiw.hu.

The researcher, Daniel Varga, wrote me to tell me about them. He’s been doing extensive work analyzing the community that he’s visualized and notes that a power-law approach is not suitable for wiw.hu.

Totally fascinating. He’s working on a paper based on his experiments in case anyone is interested in speaking with him. He’s welcome to any feedback!

A friend of a friend pointed me to Hipster Bingo – such a riot! This is great in conjunction with The Hipster Handbook (which i read instead of socializing last weekend at a friend’s).

It’s always the little things that make me smile. Like this treasure.

If you haven’t seen these hand-drawn visualizations of social networks, you absolutely must – they are gorgeous.

i am a dork; we all know that… thus, i’m a wiki. ::sigh:: Of course, i will admit that i’ve been fleshing out the anthropologists section at Wikipedia lately.

Here’s a neat blog entry weighing in on why friendster is lame & rad.

I realized that i never posted about Wallop because the entry that i wrote got destroyed in a network snafu. Oops.

So, if you don’t know already, you should know about Wallop, a research project underway by Lili Cheng and gang. (If you don’t know about the Social Computing Group at MSR, you should – amazing people, fantastic research.)

So… Wallop. Currently, there are a lot of rumors and secrets going around about what it is. Read Wired for a debunking of some of those rumors (and a discussion of what is known). Other press curiosity comes from eWeek.

I’m not going to speculate on what they’re doing, but i will say a few things about MSR. First, they have brilliant researchers who are on top of their shit, know the theories, know the technology and have a hell of a lot of potential. Lili Cheng is no small designer. That said, MSR is not the same as Microsoft. What they create is rarely the end product that Microsoft ships. They operate based on good ideas, not necessarily good product strategies. They study people & their use, not consumer trends. Deploying a MSR research project is very different than MS deploying a new technology. Thus, it will be really interesting to see how this evolves. But also very exciting.

Also, it’s important to realize their market… think about who uses IM (and particularly MSN IM). This is a *very* different market than Friendster/Tribe/SocialText etc. is going after (and also very different than the AIM market, as they learned the hard way from their research on 3 Degrees). New markets, new lessons, new uses of social software and social networks…