Google, parent company of orkut.com, is being sued by social networking company Affinity Engines over source code they claim was illegally taken from them by Orkut Buyukkokten.

Buyukkokten co-founded Affinity Engines with Tyler Ziemann after they graduated from Stanford in 2001 in order to develop social networking software inCircle. Ziemann claims that when Buyukkokten joined Google he agreed not to develop any competing social networking software, and that by appropriating the code he helped to bring orkut.com quickly and unfairly to market.

According to Wired News:

In addition to nearly identical text found in similar features in orkut.com and Affinity Engine's social-networking products, the suit cited several identical software problems in each company's service.

"In its initial investigation, AEI (Affinity Engines) uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs … in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in orkut.com," according to the lawsuit. "The presence of these bugs in both products is highly indicative of a common source code…. orkut.com contains software and source code copied, developed or derived from AEI's inCircle software or source code."

The suit, filed on May 25 in Santa Clara Superior Court, is seeking unspecified damages and royalties.

After Brad Howarth's 'investigation' into social networking, (blogged on Jun 24), and Scott Allen's rejoinder on the Online Business Networks Blog, comes Howarth's response and another sceptical piece by Iain Ferguson on ZDNet Australia.

As Howarth noted in an e-mail … social networking companies are asking people to alter the means by which they construct and maintain relationships and are yet to show that people will do so over time in a manner that will generate strong revenue for the service provider. "Many companies have gone broke chasing models based on online advertising revenue or in transitioning free services to paid ones.

"There are exceptions — but these are exceptions, not the rule".

This whole discussion - will they or won't they succeed - really seems a bit like a non-argument: It's widely accepted that it takes at least three years for a business to become established, so the jury has to remain out on social networking start-ups for a while longer yet.

Some may argue that the fundamental principles upon which social software is based are flawed, but smart businesses will evolve as they develop a deeper understanding of the dynamics of social networking and the people who use their services. Today's flawed website might be tomorrow's winner.

The internet is a difficult arena in which to build a business, but that does not mean that all internet start-ups are doomed to failure. There is every possibility that some social networking businesses will succeed because they do offer something useful - the opportunity to see at a glance who is a friend of your friends, or a contact of your contacts, and an easy way to manage and expand that sort of data.

How much use individuals gain from this type of service really does depend on the individual. It is as easy to find people who have benefited from social networking as it is to find someone who hasn't, but finding single examples from either camp is not instructive when it comes to judging the business as a whole. Instead, one would have to gather and analyse empirical data on user behaviour and business results.

Overall, the questions which are important to social networking companies are the same questions that every new business faces. The bottom line remains: Can they bring in enough cash to pay the bills?

Only time will tell.

People with Bluetooth devices can now use a new service called BEDD to meet and interact with other users. The BEDD software searches automatically for people nearby who are interested in friendship, dating, buying and selling, or chatting, and then connects users whose profiles match. It also alerts users when their friends or family are nearby and allows them to communicate by free Bluetooth chat messaging, SMS, MMS, Call, IM or email.

From HardwareZone:

"The BEDD software is fun for the end user because it's carrying the most demanded content in the world - people content. Content about who you are and about what you want… content about you!" [said BEDD CEO and founder, Stephen Carlton].

The fact that this is a revolutionary concept was further endorsed … when Nokia's Series 60 Platform named BEDD "Application of the Week."

Friendster has emailed a select group of users, which they call 'SuperFriends', to ask for feedback on four different potential marketing emails, says danah boyd on Many2Many:

The tone of these messages is desperate, begging for attention of the original early adopters - the ones that Abrams told me were ruining his system. One focuses on Burning Man types; one mocks the old Power Point COO; one charges non-users with harming children; one is a desperate love poem. They're hyper American-centric, SF-centric, white collar, wannabee hipster, intentionally attempting sarcasm ... and complete with 80s references.

On her personal site, Apophenia, boyd goes into more detail and posts the full email, which starts:

As a SuperFriend, we would appreciate your feedback on a new email campaign. Friendster will soon be sending emails to two groups of Friendster members - active members who use the site and inactive members who have not recently used the site. We created two email versions for each group and want your opinion to help us decide which versions to use.

As one of boyd's readers points out, Friendster may not be quite as desperate as they seem, instead using this odd request as a ploy to get back on people's blogs and into their bookmarks. Either way, if the Social Software Weblog's poll is anything to go by, Friendster has a lot of work to do if it wants to catch up with Ecademy or Multiply.

A three year old blog chronicling the life of a woman called Layne Johnson has been revealed as a fake. According to the Mercury News, the Plain Layne Weblog had thousands of readers who were drawn by her polished, witty postings about "her relationships, her travels and her adventures at 'Minicorp', the nickname she gave her high-tech Minnesota employer".

Layne not only kept a blog, she commented on other people's, created profiles on social networking sites and exchanged emails and instant messages with fans.

At the beginning of June, however, the blog was suddenly taken down, and now the man behind it, Odin Soli, has admitted that it was a fake, saying that he created Layne as an experiment in 'interactive fiction'.

In a telephone interview, Soli said the character helped him deal with the pressures of his own life, including the rare disease that is killing him. "I honestly don't know if I could have kept going if I didn't have this character to pour my life into," he said.

The deception has left Layne's fans struggling with a complex set of emotions, from anger and betrayal to respect for the writing and a con well done. And it demonstrates how easy it is for the Internet to foster intimacy among total strangers.

Theyworkforyou.com is a new British political website which was launched at the beginning of June at NotCon04, a one day tech conference held in London. Visitors to the site can find out who their local Member of Parliament is, fax their representative via FaxYourMP.com, and track any MP's contribution to parliamentary debates both on the website, which has full archives going back to 2001, and via RSS.

They Work For You scrapes content from Hansard, the public daily record of parliamentary debates, and converts their rather unwieldy transcripts into a more user friendly format.

Importantly, members of the site can also comment on an MP's speeches and vote on whether their 'written answers' are adequate:

What are Written Answers?

The parliamentary question is a great way for MPs to discover information which the government may not wish to reveal. Ministers reply via written answers, a list of which gets published daily.

We let you vote on whether or not the answer given is adequate.

This aspect of the site, which turns it into something akin to a giant political blog, will likely be the aspect that draws most users in, allowing them to publicly express their opinions on the issues which interest them most and form communities around both issues and MPs.

An open source project, They Work For You was put together by a group of volunteers, funded only by a £3,000 grant from the charity UK Citizens Online Democracy. According to The Guardian:

The list of volunteers reads like a who's who of Britain's nascent e-democracy scene. Tom Loosemore is part of the team behind the successful FaxYourMP site. Other members of the group have produced a roll call of e-democracy and "social software" sites such as UpMyStreet.com, the Public Whip and the recent Downing Street Says, which allows users to read summaries briefings and add comments to the lobby briefings given twice daily by the prime minister's official spokesman.

… "It is a small effort to reconnect parliament and Westminster with their electorate, but an incredibly important one," [said Loosemore].

Panellists at the Business 4Site conference earlier in June discussed what motivates users to stay active in their online networks.

According to eWeek, Jas Dhillon, president and CEO of ZeroDegrees Inc. considers the most important motivator to be the 'favour economy' - the mutually beneficial nature of online business relationships. However, Antony Brydon, co-founder and CEO of Visible Path Corp. considers cold, hard cash to be the best incentive.

He [Brydon] dismissed the notion that goodwill alone will motivate people to join and become engaged in social networking.

"No way," Brydon said. "The favor economy is where we started, and we quickly moved to the barter economy and then the economy economy. It's an ideological point that will become a real issue for what to do to move things along faster [in this industry]."

Many successful businesses are driven by the 'network effect' - relying on getting enough people to sign up to make their service or tool more valuable. This is particularly true of social networking tools, such as Friendster or LinkedIn which have to reach a 'critical mass' of users before they become viable.

The Guardian's Inside IT section this week takes a look at the network effect and examines the case of new search engine Eurekster.

Eurekster's combination of search and social networking aims to make search results more manageable and more personal by letting users see just the links that people they trust think are worth looking at…

You can set up a group of friends and colleagues or join special interest groups. We like relying on personal recommendation but most of us don't know whose recommendations to trust online: the social networking tools of Eurekster's sister service Real Contacts could certainly help there, and Eurekster has just started powering a custom search for members of the Friendster site.

Atlassian Software Systems have released the first major update to Confluence, their professional J2EE wiki. According to TMCnet.com, it includes improvements to macro management, attachment searching and versioning.

"Confluence 1.1, our first major update, leverages the tremendous feedback we've received from our customers without digressing from the essential and powerful simplicity of the wiki. Confluence 1.1 makes it even easier for teams to share information with each other and with the world", Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian's CEO and co-founder) said.

Wikis are gaining more acceptance in the corporate environment as a valuable social networking and knowledge management tool, and Business Week have a good wiki primer, introducing the Wikipedia and wiki farms both free and commercial.

The popularity of social networking sites like Ryze, LinkedIn and Friendster has not spread as far as the Antipodes, according to ZDNet Australia. Instead, social networking has been called 'a fad', with sceptics questioning both its value and the viability of current business models.

A poll of Australian investors found none were aware of any social networking services having started up here, and most were sceptical of the model as demonstrated in the US.

According to the principal at Technology Venture Partners, Mike Zimmerman, this may have to do with the Australian population lacking the necessary scale to support such a venture. The most popular commercial tool, Linked-In, boasts 700,000 users globally, but at the start of June had only 8124 in Australia.

Andrew Weinreich, whose proprietary algorithms formed the basis of sites such as Friendster, is now providing political candidates and non-profit organisations with hosted community building tools via new site, I Stand For.

I Stand For uses social networking software, customer relationship management tools and content management systems to help organisations attract new members and encourage discussion and interaction.

According to the Web Host Industry Review:

"My vision five years ago was to revolutionize social networking," says Weinreich, CEO of I Stand For. "Now, it's to revolutionize building member and constituent bases for political campaigns, not-for-profit organizations and other member based businesses."

If you want to share doggie delights, then try Dogster. Based on Friendster, it allows you to post pictures of your pooch and meet up with new Pup Pals. There are over 26,000 dogs online to search through, each with a profile that includes information such as breed, size, hometown and favourite walk.

Coming soon for other pet owners: Catster, Rabbitster and Hamsterster. Possibly.

UPDATE: as a reader below comments, indeed, Ted Rheingold's Dogster service has been around for awhile (and his Catster service is in the works) but Suw found a story this last week with an update on the total number of dogs who have trotted on over to Ted's service. And Suw will probably be happy to know that there is indeed a HAMSTERster service already in existence by david hornbuckle.

Social networking start-up Visible Path Corp. has received an additional $2 million in Series A funding as it nears the launch of its Relationship Capital Management (RCM) software. Venture capitalists Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers have now invested a total of $5.7 million in the company.

CEO Antony Brydon told eWEEK.com that the first version of RCM will be released on July 1.

With the full launch, Visible Path is focusing the RCM platform on sales and marketing groups within enterprises. The software, after scanning enterprise and desktop applications, can apply statistical methods to create a map of an organization's relationships. It deciphers the connections among employees and to outside contacts and weighs the strength of relationships.

"We found the most resonance not in any given industry but in a business process—selling," Brydon said.