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I’ve been out of high school for only five years, but every so often I wonder what my old classmates are up to. What ever happened to that weird kid in shop class? Where did the captain of the football team end up? Is that cute girl from homeroom still single? Reunion.com is the latest site aimed at helping you answer these and other burning questions. As befits a newer site, it has more of a social-networking feel than the older sites in the space. It’s got a bunch of nifty tools (it can tell you who’s looking for you, for example), But its search results are less reliable than Classmates.com’s, and the older site offers many more ways to network. Reunion.com makes up for these shortcomings, however, with its cool Outlook toolbar.

Site of the Week: Reunion.com: Full Review - Review by PC Magazine

Word about social network Hi5’s $20 million financing leaked earlier today. But that isn’t it for social networking funding news. We hear it from a good source, but without confirmation by the company, that Tagged has raised its own $15 million round, on a $102 million pre-money valuation.

We do not know who made the investment. This is Tagged’s third round of financing. They previously raised two rounds - $1.5 from angel investors in September 2005, and $7 million from Mayfield three months later.

[Big Money For Tagged, Too]

Social networks are spawning a generation of internet tarts, research suggests: online consumers with little brand loyalty and no qualms about keeping several sites on the go at once.

Users of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are “chronically unfaithful”, a survey by Parks Associates, the analysts, has found. Half of users regularly use more than one site, most of which are free. One in six actively uses three or more.

This phenomenon of “network promiscuity” extends across web commerce. Analysts say that it is symptomatic of a new consumer scepticism over traditional branding.

After having to keep redoing my profile from Friendster, to Myspace, to Facebook, to every single other site out there that’s rebranding as a social network,  marketers will face a difficult challenge in keeping and attracting users.

[Read: Websites betrayed by unfaithful users - Times Online]

Google’s at it again. Add one more fish to the belly of the beast known as Google. According to the Official Google Blog Google has acquired yet another company and its intellectual properties: Zenter an online slide presentations software company.

You’ve heard us talk a lot about using the web to improve group collaboration and information sharing. These days, when you create a document — whether it’s a text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation — you usually want to share it, collect feedback, or communicate about it in some way. We on the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team focus on making this experience easier and more powerful for you. In particular, we’re working to add presentation-sharing capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and we’re excited about the addition of Zenter’s technology and team to that effort.

Youtube crosses the cultural boundaries and will soon come in nine different flavors. With increasing demand for multilingual and multicultural videos Google has announced that Youtube will now have nine new domains in Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland and the UK. You can read the entire story at the Official Google Blog.

In response to many requests, each new site is fully translated and localized for each country including content (Featured Videos, Director Videos, Promotions), as well as the interfaces, search, user support, and such community features as video ratings, sharing, and content flagging. And these new localized versions are built using Google
search technology, so you can quickly find more of what you want to see. Perhaps best of all, you can continue to use youtube.com, or move to one of these localized sites — and switch seamlessly between the two. Happy creating, viewing and sharing!

Oh I’m so excited now I can watch people from around the world act stupid… and think of the foreign girls. Thank you Google for being so damn good.

Fantastic! Looks like the internet just got one more way underage kids can “hook-up” and over-age pervs can get their fix all while satisfying their carbonated urges. Coca-Cola’s Sprite takes a stab at the social networking craze with its new “Sprite Yard,” a mobile-based social networking site aimed towards teens. ClickZ.com has the full story.

Yard acts as a mobile site for users to connect with peers, share photos, and discover content. Modules divide activities into six areas. Pix is an online photo gallery where users can share photos with friends and comment on friends’ photos. Scribbles acts as a message board or chat room where users can hold live conversations. Shouts is an SMS and e-mail-like messaging system with richness and texture. Planner allows users to post a two-week schedule to let friends know of their upcoming activities. Nuggets is a storehouse of digital mobile goodies like ringtones, mobisodes (mostly featuring lemon and lime characters) and other downloadables, which will be unlocked with PIN codes found on Sprint bottles.

Technorati Tags: social networking, mobile, Sprite

SmashingMagazine.com, as usual, has done an excellent job describing the practice of link-baiting.

Link baiting is not evil. Although some bloggers tend to go beyond any ethical considerations in their attempts to enforce as many reciprocal links as possible, the term itself stands for a completely organic nature of the Web - actually, something that has already been here for a while. Traditional link building, used to be bounded with Search Engine Optimization, is now being extended with the aspect of so-called Social Media Optimization - with Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Del.icio.us & Co. on the bandwagon. Driving traffic to your site has become easier, but requires through-out strategies and understanding some basic rules of useful content and effective content marketing.

Read the Rest Here