PayPerPost Sparks on with SocialSpark

PayPerPost will be launching a new social network in January 2008 called SocialSpark. The networking site will allow bloggers and advertisers (currently over 85,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers) to create profiles while users visiting the site will “browse the public profiles of advertisers and bloggers along with their associated sponsorship and blog related data.”

”It’s the first social network that is designed from the ground up to be advertiser-centric, while preserving the free, managed flow of user information common within other networks” said CEO Ted Murphy.

The idea is for advertisers to interact with bloggers who are willing to take pay per post type advertising and run with it.

According to Micheal Arrington at TechCrunch, there’s absolutely nothing distasteful about it as an idea, but to the extent it furthers the pollution of the blogosphere by encouraging more paid shilling, and makes us all worse off.

Google Launches 'OpenSocial' Platform

As first reported at TechCrunch, Google has announced a social networking platform called OpenSocial, which includes tools to allow developers to create applications that utilize personal and social data contained in participating social networks - the first step toward putting you back in control of your online relationships.

Google appears to be supplying the "social graph" - the map of relationships between people that makes it possible for you to see when your friends add applications, photos or new connections to their profiles - with tools to allow developers access to the social graph and other personal data on participating networks.

Several players in the social networking space such as Hi5, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning Engage.com, Friendster, Hyves, imeem, MySpace, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING as well as widget developers RockYou, Slide, iLike and Flixster have all signed on to supply applications based on the platform. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is not on the list.

According to Mashable, Google finally released their open source container sample on November 9. After looking through it and the accompanying documentation, it definitely provides a good starting point for potential OpenSocial developers to begin forming the basis for their applications.