TowerOne.com

It looks as though Webjam have exhausted the $2m they raised from French VC I-Source Gestion and are now looking for further investment. My source says that a second round of $12m will fund international expansion, technical development and marketing.
Webjam are a kind of mix of Ning and Netvibes, allowing users to create private or open pages that can be used as a homepage or an entire social networking site. It uses an ajax interface to add modules to pages: blogging, music and video, photos and news feeds, forums and message boards, maps, email, polls, notepads etc,.

www.webjam.com

Tags: Netvibes, Ning, Webjam

Word is now out that a Google led alliance will launch OpenSocial on Thursday. OpenSocial is a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including declared partners LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. Unlike Facebook which uses its own markup language, developers for OpenSocial will be free to use Flash, html and javascript.

By pulling together with with Salesforce.com and Oracle, who are moving to let third-party programmers write applications that can be accessed by their customers, Google hopes to create a rival platform that could have broad appeal to developers. The alliance and partner pact potentially has a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.

Microsoft recently took a $240million stake in Facebook, valuing the media darling social site at $15billion, despite the fact that it does not make money.

Tags: Facebook, Friendster, Google, hi5, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com