Another Harvard student seeking some credit for Facebook's inspiration. But, really, in 2003, was it all that original an idea to create a social networking site to share photos, birthdays, etc?

Friendster, Orkut, and MySpace had all been around for years. I don't think it's the feature set that uniquely drove Facebook to win a huge market. I think it has more to do with execution (and luck). Facebook was certainly smart to recognize that privacy of personal information and tapping into an existing social community were keys to adoption and growth.

Quoted: The Web site has been fighting claims that its founder stole the idea. Now another man says he was the creator.

Going beyond social news, nowpublic.com invites ordinary citizens to directly report the news.

Create an account and file your "story" (including images and video upload).

Quoted: crowd powered media

Wikia (Jimmy Wales) is announcing a social-relevance search engine.

... I think he's wrong about this ...

Quoted: "If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers," said Wales, chairman of San Mateo, California-based Wikia. "I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome."

Sign up for an account on listio and help me vote up Blue Dot in the "Bookmarks" category. We weren't even listed on this Web 2.0 summary site, much less highly ranked in our category.

Thanks!

Quoted: Listio : Directory of web 2.0 applications, tools and Web 2.0 services. Users can submit new apps, or vote and comment on existing web 2.0 applications.

New layout for groups in Facebook. Data on visitors:

18M "active members"
25M monthly visitors in February
(MySpace is at 100M monthly visitors)

Quoted: Facebook, which has enjoyed explosive growth relative to rival social networking sites since a membership crisis six months ago, is set to unveil new features on Wednesday that mark its progress from a dating site for college kids into a mainstream network tool.

Digg's comments are mostly useless. Call to bring slashdot-style karma points to filter out the crap.

Quoted: Yesterday I posted about Robert Scoble calling for a Digg Boycott following his reading of the comments on the Kathy Sierra story. I posed the question: what, if ...

Very interesting acticle about restrictions on MySpace. I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by not allowing their users to continue to customize their pages they way they want. Intenet loyalty is very tenuous; too much of this could drive their users to a competing service.

Also mentions Spring Widget as a Fox Interactive company that may get preferred treatment to run in MySpace pages.

Quoted: MySpace, the Web’s largest social network, has gradually been imposing limits on the software tools that users can embed in their pages.

MySpace is entering the social news category. This follows FaceBook's entry with a social bookmarking feature earlier this year.

It's certainly additional validation for Blue Dot's market. Will it hurt us competitively? Maybe. But there are a lot of people that wouldn't be caught dead on MySpace. It's also seems to be more directly competitive with Digg and NewsVine.

Quoted: Now, the big question is what this thing is going to look like. If it's anything like the rest of MySpace, with slow page loads, flashing banner ads, and Web 1.0 design, you won't catch me using it.