Firesheep demonstrates a security flaw that the computer security community has been concerned about for years — that any network eavesdropper can take over another user's session (say, a login to a webmail or social networking account) just by sniffing packets and copying the victim's cookie

Veteran tech entrepreneur Bob Bickel has let out a whisper of his new venture, Ringside Networks, which will aim to make social networking applications work outside the network.

Ubuntero.com is a one-of-a-kind social network designed by and for Ubuntu users, developers, and evangelists. Registration is finally open! (The site is down at the moment because they got dugg, but it might be worth a look)

"AllPeers is a social BitTorrent extension for Firefox. The ease of use and the appealing user interface make it especially popular among people who are relatively new to BitTorrent, but why do we need a social BitTorrent client?"

Managing buddies on a few online social networks isn't too much of a hassle, but throw in your contact list from instant messaging platforms and online apps and services like Flickr, Digg, and Twitter, and you have a contact list that'd rival that of Kevin Bacon.

When a network is small and most of its users interact chiefly with services on the Internet at large, it's easy to get by simply by assigning numeric Internet Protocol addresses to your nodes rather than names. As the network grows, however, and as internal services (wikis, mail servers, media servers, and more) come online, recalling numeric addresses becomes unwieldy.

The only real exchange between peers in a traditional peer-to-peer network is limited to the files being transferred. Tribler is a new P2P network that's introducing social networking concepts to facilitate better interactions between users. Its users will also be able to cash in on their generous uploads for faster downloads.

Hackers now have their own social network, backed by GnuCitizen, a high-profile "ethical hacking" group.

Google's OpenSocial initiative to establish common, standard APIs for creating social-networking applications is still in its early days. But its impact for end users, developers, Web site owners, social-network operators and even business application vendors could be huge in the long run.