Planblog

According to this piece by Jeff Pulver, Facebook in Germany grew 30+ percent in just the past two (2) weeks: Facebook: Experiencing Viral, Rapid Growth outside of North America

That’s a lot of new members year-over-year.

At this rate, it’s not unlikely they’ll out-grow everybody else, namely StudiVZ and Xing. And keep in mind they haven’t even localized yet.

Wiki meets Facebook.

First up, the Wiki Project:

theWikiProject is a place for you, your friends, and your groups to write Web pages together. Using the same software that powers Wikipedia, you can share pages with just a few folks, inside Facebook, or with the whole world at theWikiProject.net!

Another cool feature is a wiki-style Wall, since you can put your own page inside your Facebook profile, and any and all of your friends can edit it.

This is EXPERIMENTAL software by a couple of developers who wanted to use MediaWiki inside of Facebook. We CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR PRIVACY nor the RELIABILITY OF OUR STORAGE. Yes, it’s on Amazon.com’s servers and we make hourly backups, but this is just a very small project at the moment…

… but if you pitch in and join theWikiProject, we think it could be a whole lot bigger!

Read how the makers of the Wiki Project explain “Why a wiki?“

Secondly, Wetpaint launched the beta version of its Wiki Whiteboard app on Monday:

Wiki Whiteboard by Wetpaint makes it simple to work together with friends and groups inside Facebook. Adding content, images, videos, and dozens of other widgets is as easy as clicking and typing.

Who knows, there may already be more wiki apps on Facebook than just these two…

A few days ago, I received an invite to Quechup from a friend (not that I would have signed up).

Yesterday, he sent this follow-up:

Subject: Sorry about Quechup

Hello all,

You probably got an e-mail from me recently asking you
to join Quechup, a social networking site. Sorry
about that! Please ignore it. I clicked on something
from a tech-savvy friend, thinking it was safe. It
wasn’t and it did bad, bad things with my address
book. Quechup is the devil.

Again, sorry!

G

‘Nuff said.

This “problem” has been around for how many days now? Further proof that this is intentional behavior on Quechup’s part. Otherwise, they would have fixed it by now.

Tantek mentions he’s been sitting down with a few folks for “a vigorous brainstorming and discussion session on social network portability.” Some of the outcome can be found on the microformats (where else) wiki: Social Network Portability

For anyone interested in helping solve this important piece of the social networking puzzle, there’s SocialNetworkDevCamp coming up September 8/9 in Richmond, CA:

SocialNetworkDevCamp will focus on API and Widget development from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Linked In and others. The camp will also start the process of identifying open APIs and data structures which would facilitate the creation of open standards for social networking.

Inspired by the success of the iPhoneDevCamp, we would like to post a list of application ideas that we can actually implement at the event, or at least get the ball rolling. To that end, please review the list of ideas, post your own, sign up for a project, or if you are a non-coder, add use cases, design ideas, comments, etc. PLEASE do attend if you are not a coder, as we will need testers, usability ideas, design creativity, documentation, etc. All are needed!

Seems like things are still in the process of being organized, so Data Sharing Summit and SocialNetworkDevCamp may well be one and the same (at least the date, topic, and location seem to somewhat match).

LinkedIn just launched their new blog: Your window to LinkedIn

Via Jeremiah Owyang: Community Evangelism isn’t just about Marketing, and LinkedIn takes the second step

Ever heard of Twitter? Well, Twitter is now Twitter, Inc.

Via GigaOm: Twitter Leaves the Nest

Hamburg, Germany-based business networking startup Xing, formerly known as OpenBC, is advertising to the US market:

It’s not just what you know, it’s who you know

XING is a business network for professionals that successfully combines know-how with know-who. Find deals, employees, colleagues and jobs through your own contacts. XING has more than 1.6 million members and is available in 16 languages.

…

Start networking - not just linkin’!
Offer! Join now and receive 1 month premium membership for free

Xing went public in December 2006 and recently acquired Spanish business networking site eConozco. Their first annual report is available for download here.

Going through my feeds today I come across another two new social networks for mothers:

• Mamily.de — Online community for mothers (Hamburg, Germany)
• PaulsMama.de — Social network for families (Hamburg, Germany)
• Netmoms.de — By mothers for mothers (Cologne, Germany)

PaulsMama I had heard of before. And there may be at least one more project based in Berlin that’s currently in the making that I’m aware of.

Not surprising to finally see this level of actvity. There must be a least half a dozen similar projects in the US already.

You know what to do…

I’m on JoinR.  Feel free to join me.

Not that I need another social network (I don’t even know if it’s any good), but it’s from Germany so I’m biased.

They’ve been making good use of their blog (in German) leading up to the launch.