A fellow named Fons Tuinstra posted a lament about the usefulness of his LinkedIn account in terms of developing his business relationships.

From the BBC:

Social network sites are moving to make it much easier for software developers to write add-ons for the hugely popular web destinations.

Bebo, Facebook, Meebo and Friendster have unveiled plans to help them become more than places to keep in touch.

The add-ons will allow users to add extras, such as video and music clips, to the personal profiles they maintain. ...

Significantly, Bebo's interface tools will work with Facebook's already announced development system. This will make it possible for the many developers who have written applications for Facebook to use their code almost unchanged for the Bebo network.

Despite the tie-up on tools, Bebo and Facebook will not become a unified network.

SOCIAL SITES: DAILY VISITORS MySpace - 29 million Facebook - 15 million Friendster - 5.9 million Orkut - 9.6 million Bebo - 4.8 million Source: ComScore July 2007

Bebo said it would also support Google's Open Social initiative which aims to create a unified system of tools that can be used on any and every social network site. The Open Social tools are due to appear in early 2008.

Social networking giant MySpace is backing Google's initiative

From CBC.ca:

Google Inc. is testing a new user tool that invites people to write authoritative articles on particular subjects, a move that could put the internet search giant in direct competition with the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The user-generated knowledge project, dubbed Knol, was made available this week to a small group of users in a trial, said Google's vice-president engineering, Udi Manber, in a Thursday evening post on Google's official blog.

"We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that," wrote Manber. "Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it."

Google said it would provide tools for writing, editing and provide free hosting of the content. Authors would receive credit for their work and could choose to include Google ads on their pages, with authors getting a share of the revenue generated from those ads.

Multiple articles — called knols — on the same subject would be allowed. The articles would be ranked according to a reader voting mechanism.