Ross Mayfield tipped me to this venturewire announcement— Social Networking Start-Up Imeem Launches With Series A Funding—that can be found on Morgenthaler Ventures News & Events page as a PDF file.

Hope Glassberg, who wrote this venturewire announcement, lists Friendster, MySpace, and Tickle as potential major competitors for Imeem. These 'friend aggregators' are not user-centric distributed social networking services and, if Imeem is 'distributed social software', I would not consider them to be competitors.

The only description Ms. Glassberg gives us of stealth-mode Imeem is: "...The software will provide social networking capabilities and other features along a distributed network…"

Also mentioned in this venturewire is Ted Malone, a new member of the Imeem team formerly from TiVo, who is quoted as saying that a beta version of the Imeem software will be released before the end of 2004.

Thanks for the tip Ross. Guess we'll just wait and see… (-:=

Other Distributed Social Softwares:

WiredReach
LOAF
clevercactus