Social networking is a huge market, and everyone wants a piece of it. Friendster had a good start, but Orkut (Google) and MySpace (Fox) have a bigger share of the market now. Yahoo!'s 360 and LinkedIn are among nother players.

The other two big names who haven't flipped their card yet, are Microsoft and AOL. Rumors are that AOL will launch its social networking portal in a week or two. Microsoft has teamed up with a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur to launch Wallop this year (Social Computing Research at Microsoft).

The user information gathered by Social Networking websites is "extremely" valuable in terms of online ad targeting.