…should be for "intelligence", right? In this case, it may be "idiocy".  Caterina Fake is a founder of Flickr and Facebook will not let her create an account with her name.  Hilarious. 🙂

An intelligent article from Knowledge@Wharton looks at the recent valuation discussions surrounding MySpace and Facebook, by taking Google as the yardstick.  The punchline?

The $15 billion MySpace figure "would imply that a lot more people will be on MySpace than are currently on it."

I came across SportsMates (via Can Karasikli). I had written about sports social networking before. I continue to think that, like music (think MySpace’s early days), sports fandom is another universal bonding agent. SportMates seems to follow the blogging-community-as-the-network model.

It looks like Joga has failed to maintain traction after the world cup. Alexa reports that NBX is ahead of SportsMates. I remain curious to see how this will play out.

Fred Stutzman has a good analysis of revenues generated by online social networks, building on to the models discussed at FOOCampBarCampNYC.  He first comments on the five models:

1) Ads – or, the interestingness problem
2) Product affiliation groups – or, the non-scalability of affiliation
3) Partnership Opportunities – or, limitations of partnership
4) Micropayments – or, the selling of value
5) User payments/gatekeeping fees – or, the virtual country club

He then goes on to discuss additional models:

1) Exogenous or alternative markets
2) Brokering of trust
3) The negotiation of community

The entire post is worth reading.

In my opinion, the successful revenue models on social networks will end up being the ones that exploit the inherent qualities of the connected media model.  Traditional web advertising neglects to take advantage of these qualities.  The product affiliations, micropayments and secondary markets are where my bets would be.

Seth Goldstein has a post about values he has set for himself.  They are a bit personal, and might not overlap 100% with others’, but I found that they do with mine (save #11).  (Thanks, Tahir.)

Christine Herron has an amusing and thoughtful post on David Hornik‘s opinions on viral marketing.  In many cases, metaphors work in only a few points, but we grant license for their use liberally.  In Hornik’s case, the list is nice and long.

Rafat Ali writes about the first major music move by Nokia. I find it exciting, because unlike Sony Ericsson, they seem to be paying much more attention to the content side.

I have contended for a while that there may be close to 100 million iPods sold, but this year alone, multiples of that will be sold in mp3 capable mobile handsets just this year.  iPod resembles a platform, but the true digital music revolution will take place over mobiles.  It looks like this may be the beginning.