Israel is going for a more informative tactic with its coverage of the war its fighting against Hamas militants in Gaza, and its using social media as one of its main forms of increasing its transparency, reports Times Online. After receiving a great deal of flack from not doing so during the 2006 attack on Hezbollah strongholds in Southern Lebanon, Israel realized that the Internet too can be a powerful weapon.
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Mob Wars, one of the supposed million dollar a month applications, was at the center of a dispute between SGN and David Maestri. According to SGN, the application was developed when Maestri was working at Freewebs, the Silver Spring based internet company that gave birth to what is now called Social Gaming Network. As Dan Kaplan explained back in August,
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Commercial incentive is a powerful force, and in the race for our web identities there is no exception. Over the weekend the OpenID Foundation announced that they are having its first election of community board members. Meanwhile Facebook and Google have launched their own identity services that enable users to instantly log in to any site with third-party accounts. Google Friend Connect uses open standards while Facebook Connect uses it’s own identity confirmation system.
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What started as a Facebook app has grown into a full-fledged stand-alone service that lets you make scrapbooks (of sorts) from web content you find interesting or have created elsewhere on the web. RadWebTech has just launched Scrapplet, an alternative to services like Netvibes or even Tumblr, as it lets you collect items from across the web as well as integrated content from social networking and microblogging sites.
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Cyberbullying is one of those semi-intangible acts that plays into the mysterious anonymity of the web, but that hasn’t stopped legislatures from trying to curb this very harming behavior. After a high profile suicide case in 2006, which was a result of cyberbullying that had occurred on MySpace, the state of Missouri has been trying to get more laws in place to better prosecute cyberbullying.

Ars Technica reports that a handful of changes made to the state’s harassment laws includes cyberbullying, which is something other forms of legislature across the world may begin to layer into their own existing harassment laws.
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We’ve seen so many social networks launch in the past four years, it makes even my head spin. But one key differentiating factor between many of the peripheral social networks and the major players like Facebook is the actual ability to network. Socially.

The benefits of social networking (with a purpose) began to come into focus when MySpace musicians found they could connect with each other and audiences on a professional level. And when it comes to social networking for the rest of the professionals out there, LinkedIn is the place to go. Even though Facebook hasn’t always had the best format for direct networking with the purpose of finding a job, it’s still very useful for this objective. So now that millions of people across the U.S. are in need of a job, no thanks to our current economic crisis, many are turning to Facebook and LinkedIn for recommendations and job leads.
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trooQ is a recently launched social marketplace that rivals ebay in concept with its approach to interacting with trusted buyers and sellers. What this D.C.-based service does is encourage you to buy from trusted individuals based on the relationship you build with them within the trooQ community. The setup of trooQ itself is rather user-friendly, with an easy submission form for classifieds, and profile pages that list all a user’s available items.

Search queries can be sorted in a similar way that eBay search queries can be, by those items that are ending the soonest, among other filtering options. And while there’s a focus on the social aspects of trooQ, you can still offer feedback on users after interacting with them through buying and selling on trooQ’s marketplace. These ratings will be displayed on a user’s profile.

While this approach creates a different set of trust values than eBay’s ranking system, the concept itself is not new.
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Mpowerplayer, the mobile game arcade that lets you try before you buy, has launched its MySpace application. Similar to the Facebook app launched just two weeks ago, the Mpowerplayer app on MySpace lets you discover mobile games and try them on for size. With a mobile interface directly in the application, its easy enough to get a well-rounded simulation of how the game will actually work on your cell phone.

Aside from the need to click on the mobile phone buttons instead of being able to use your thumbs, the simulation works pretty well. For each game (and mpowerplayer has a number of fun and popular games to try out), there is a link for purchasing that game and having it sent to your mobile phone.
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Drop.io has a new Firefox browser plugin that makes i even easier to share files with friends and, more specifically, with friends on Facebook. With the new plugin, you can create new drops from items you find from across the web.

It’s got a convenient drag’n'drop option for text, links, files and HTML that you’d like to share, as well as drag’n'drop tabs to the drop.io logo for creating a link to that particular tab in that drop. You can even continually drag’n'drop files to the same drop or different drops, even while other files are uploading. Drop.io has also added some keyboard shortcuts to make the sharing process even simpler: hit control + shift + D in order to create a drop.io link to the tab you’re currently viewing.
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In the truest of holiday spirits, social network hi5 has teamed up with micro-lending site Kiva.org in order to provide an integrated way in which hi5 users can make direct, person-to-person microloans via Kiva’s service. This will be accomplished through a Kiva community profile on the hi5 network, enabling the users on hi5 to lend directly to the entrepreneurs.

Why does hi5 or Kiva need a partnership like this? It enables both hi5 and Kiva to operate on a global scale. Kiva already acted as a financial medium for micro-lenders and those in developing countries in need of money to launch their startups. But digging into a large and already global network like hi5 means that Kiva can tap into hi5’s social network in order to promote more giving.
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