Sebastian Elliot was thinking up ideas on how to spend his new found time. He had only recently been laid off from his banking job and was keen to make good use of his time.

In the days leading up to this moment he had made several failed attempts to find a class where he could study Mandarin. He thought if China is to be the next Super-power he should brush up his linguistic skills. One school after another let him down; excuses ranged from ‘the classes are booked up’ to ‘the class has already started’. After Sebastian was told by a tutor that her rate was $120 an hour and she was only available at a late time of day, he thought up another idea: what if it was possible to teach someone a skill in return for another?

His first thought was to post a sign up locally but he then decided to look to the Internet for his potential skill swap partner. After a fruitless search, Sebastian decided to create his own website: www.skillbound.com.

“It’s a simple site, with a simple premise: you post a skill you have and a skill you want and look in your local area for someone interested in meeting you and making the swap.”

Even if you don’t know what skills you want you can browse through the skills other people have and see if anything piques your interest. If you don’t think you have a skill; think again. Can you drive? Can you whistle?

If you don’t want to swap a skill for another skill, you can swap it for a good or service. Perhaps instead, you’d rather monetize your talents by looking to be hired in your skill, either as a new employee, a teacher, tutor, lecturer or consultant.

“The idea is, if you have a random skill like selling products on eBay or have an interesting hobby collecting ancient Mexican artifacts but don’t have a specific job title or qualification for it, you can look to see if anyone is looking for what you have. You never know, a corporation might be looking to sell its inventory online or a lawyer might need an expert in Mexican artifacts.”

Mobile location-based social networking is expected to become a key driver for the uptake of location-based services as it provides a unifying framework for a large set of applications such as friend finders, local search and geo-tagging. While many LBS applications will include features allowing the sharing of real-time experiences via fixed social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, fully-fledged mobile location-based social networking sites will also gain momentum with more than 82 million subscriptions expected by 2013.

“While growth will be mainly driven by the availability of multimedia-centric GPS handsets, other mobile form factors will also become important,” says ABI Research director Dominique Bonte. “Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) with built-in GPS receivers have been announced, with location-based social networking site GyPSii supporting Moblin-based Intel Atom processor-powered MIDs. Connected PNDs and outdoor GPS solutions are other obvious candidates for location-based networking. Nissan Carwings’ in-car telematics solution allows the sharing and ranking of fuel consumption in Japan.”

Licensing agreements with carriers and handsets manufacturers will be a crucial success factor for location-enabled social sites to reach critical market share. While initially a wide range of business models will coexist, ultimately advertising-based models will prevail due to the perfect fit with the local search- and content-driven social context.

Another important trend is the emergence of location-enabled instant messaging with applications such as Palringo Local and Nokia Chat enriching mobile communication with location context.

AOL announced a brand new homepage available here that will let consumers access multiple social networking services directly from AOL.com, becoming the first major portal to offer direct access to information from major social networking sites. This follows the move last month to provide access to multiple e-mail services from the AOL.com site, and is part of AOL’s ongoing strategy to open its homepage, http://www.aol.com, to outside services and content – offering consumers more customization options.

The new social networking feature allows consumers to post status updates to multiple social networks at once, and provides profile activity information, including new friend requests, status updates and mail notifications from services such as AIM, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other third-party sites.

AOL.com also launched new tools and features to further personalize the user experience, bringing together third-party content and services from across the Internet. The new features give consumers more control over how content and services are displayed, letting them customize the main navigation bar by adding their own Web links, receive continuously updated local news, access RSS feeds from across the Web directly from the main page of AOL.com as well as personalize their experience with new design themes.

“As the Web becomes more fragmented, consumers want choice and relevance in their Web experiences. AOL.com is the first traditional big portal to offer access to popular social networking sites all in one place,” said Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President, AOL Programming. “Now consumers can connect with their numerous networks and information sources all from AOL.com. We have already seen success by opening up AOL.com to other e-mail providers. We will continue to enhance the appeal of our portal with the changes we are making today by adding more relevant programming, customization opportunities, greater integration of third party content, improved design and access to social networks directly from AOL.com.”

As part of this redesign, AOL’s digital advertising business Platform A, and AOL.com are offering more robust capabilities for advertisers including customized wallpapers, increased rich media capabilities, much deeper and richer content integration opportunities and more. For example, a recent one-day advertisement for a new DVD provided a chance for the advertiser to own the AOL.com homepage wallpaper for the day to reach consumers in a highly customizable and measurable way.

AOL recently announced a new AOL Mail experience, with an updated look-and-feel to match the new AOL.com. New plug-ins and shortcuts provide 1-click access to relevant AOL and third-party content and services and extend e-mail aggregation to the AOL inbox. Users can now track and use their Yahoo! Mail through AOL Mail, http://mail.aol.com.

In September, the AOL.com site began allowing consumers access to Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail accounts, in addition to AOL and AIM Mail, allowing them to check e-mail from multiple accounts without having to go from site to site. That month, year-over-year page views to AOL.com grew 34%, unique visitors were up 12%, total visits were up 15% and total minutes were up 40%, according to the September 2008 comScore Media Metrix report.

“Leveraging our acquisitions of Sphere to deliver related articles and content in the RSS Reader, and Relegence to power local news stories will improve our current offering and serve to bring consumers a differentiated experience,” added Wilson.

myYearbook is now the fastest-growing online social network in the United States.  comScore says that it is now the 14^th largest site in the US as measured by page views and the 19^th largest site as measured by total minutes spent.

Logging more than 1.5 billion page views and 792 million minutes spent online in September, myYearbook surpassed internet destinations such as Amazon, ESPN, and Wikipedia and continues to grow. The site, founded by two NJ high school students, boasts 256% year over year growth as of August according to Hitwise (data based on custom category of social networking websites), another leading provider of competitive internet intelligence.

“The secret to our growth is our integrated suite of applications that resonate with our members,” reports Catherine Cook, teenage cofounder of myYearbook. “We offer our users a unique online experience ranging from the ability to engage in social games like Battles and Owned to donating to their favorite charities through Causes.”

myYearbook currently adds 40,000 new members per day to its user base of 11 million members, and is one of the most engaging social media destinations on the web with members logging in 8 times per month and spending, on average, 30 minutes per visit to the site.

“The latest comScore data demonstrates that we are well on our way to becoming the largest social media space on the web,” says Geoff Cook, CEO of myYearbook.

ClipBlast!, the premier Web-wide video navigation and distribution platform, today announced its partnership with Clearspring Technologies to distribute and track video widgets.

ClipBlast! will use the Clearspring platform to distribute widgets that provide custom video content, channels and playlists. The widgets will feature the ClipBlast! Intelligent Index, which enables users to pull video from thousands of sources and play the content from any web page, social profile, blog or other web location. Clearspring’s real time analytics tools will track and monetize the widgets and their activity.

“Clearspring gives us a tremendous opportunity to bring video to audiences anywhere on the web, through widgets that can be shared across multiple platforms,” said Gary Baker, CEO of ClipBlast! “It also gives us the tools and metrics to provide advertisers with the most effective access to that audience.”

“We’re pleased to be able to provide our user base with ClipBlast!’s unique ability to surface video anywhere on the web, and engage viewers right at that point of discovery,” said Hooman Radfer, CEO of Clearspring. “ClipBlast! frees video from any constraint of file or player format, making it truly ideal for simplified sharing and viral distribution.”

The partnership increases the reach of Clearspring’s leading enterprise-class widget syndication platform, which enables content providers and marketers to quickly repackage existing content and services as viral widgets and distribute them across multiple platforms to reach new audiences and engage them in new ways. Clearspring analytics provides a deep understanding of who is using the widgets and how they are interacting with them across the Web, giving content providers, publishers and advertisers with the audience measurements that are critical to the emerging widget economy.

This past spring, ClipBlast! unveiled ClipBlast! Playbox, a detached, cross-platform video technology that recognizes and features video from thousands of sources across the video web in native players as the content distributor intended. ClipBlast! Playbox is a frame that effectively allows users the ability to view, save and share videos, no matter what the source, in a simple, unified user experience. Playbox is a distributed technology that allows content distributors more views and viewers of their embeddable video content. Playbox can be accessed at the ClipBlast! website or any website that adopts the Playbox technology.

The Answers Corporation announced that its WikiAnswers social knowledge Q&A community reached four million questions only 72 days after reaching the 3 million milestone. The 4 millionth question was:

• Are there any new sports in the 2008 Beijing Olympics?

The question was answered and placed into the Beijing Olympics category by members of the WikiAnswers community, a group of over one million registered users and over 350 volunteer supervisors from every corner of the globe. WikiAnswers continues to increase its community base, working to grow its searchable and informative database of questions and answers.

The WikiAnswers community has responded to 35 categories of Olympics questions, including:

• What is an Olympiad?
• Why do Olympic divers shower after each dive?
• Why is an Olympic Marathon 26 miles long?
• What do the Olympic rings symbolize?
• Was tug of war an Olympic event in the past?
• Who is the youngest person to compete at the Olympics?
• What Olympic sports are for women only?
• Are there springs in a gymnastics floor exercise mat?
• When did trampolining become an Olympic sport?
• What cities are bidding for 2016 Olympics?
• Who has won medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics?
• Who was the 1st African American to win a swimming gold medal at the Olympics?
• When did drug testing start in the Olympics?
• What country has won the most Olympic gold medals in a single year?
• Who has won the most gold medals in a single Olympic event?
• Who has won gold medals at 5 or more Olympic Games?
• What Summer Olympic event has the US never medaled in?
• Who is John Stephen Akhwari who ran in the Mexico City Olympics?
• Who is the only Olympic athlete to win the Nobel Prize?
• Who was the first woman to win an Olympic Gold Medal?

According to Bob Rosenschein, Answers CEO, “The 4 million questions so far represent the dynamic harnessing of collective wisdom of the greater WikiAnswers’ community and its dedicated supervisors. The fact that we are witnessing this acceleration during the summer months reinforces our optimism about the upcoming back-to-school season.”

WikiAnswers, ranked earlier this month as a Top 20 Web 2.0 Site by Hitwise, a leading online competitive intelligence service. WikiAnswers is a social knowledge Q&A site with nearly 3,500 categories and close to 11 million US unique monthly visitors (comScore, July 2008).

In addition, Meme-It descriptors are now being used to rank stories on the community-driven DailyWe section of the website. By clicking on a particular Meme-It descriptor at the top of the DailyWe community page, users can see a list of stories that other readers have judged to fit that emotion. For example, readers might choose to view the most uplifting stories of the day or week. Alternatively, they might select the most tragic. Meme-It allows DailyWe to provide greater context to the stories it presents than simple up-and-down voting would allow.

“Community-driven news represents an important facet of the DailyMe experience, so we’ve been seeking a more meaningful ranking of stories that goes beyond simple popularity. Ultimately, the news stories that matter most to us are those that trigger an emotional response, whether insightful or tragic, humorous or uplifting. By launching Meme-It, we are acknowledging the emotional nature of news and allowing users to share their own responses with the entire DailyMe community,” said Neil Budde, President, Chief Product Officer of DailyMe.

Pluck announced that Swift Communications is using Pluck’s technology platform to power new social media capabilities across Swift’s portfolio of digital properties. Swift Communications publishes more than 30 regional news and information sites in the northwest U.S., including the The Union (California), Vail Daily (Colorado) and The Greeley Tribune (Colorado).

“Our company motto is great people connecting communities – and Pluck social media technology helps us take that promise to a new level on the web,” said Robert Brown, COO of Swift Communications. “Working with Pluck, we gain the advantages of multi-site management capabilities while providing our loyal readers with new ways to interact with news and readers like them online, which are essential to our business of serving local communities.”

Founded in 1975, Swift Communications has grown to be one of the largest regional publishers – servicing readers in Oregon, Colorado, Nevada, Nebraska, South Dakota and Northern California. In just over 90 days, Swift integrated Pluck’s social media platform across more than 25 of its digital properties to give readers more access and input into the issues and topics that matter most in their communities. Pluck social media technology provides site visitors a complete range of social media capabilities, including user comments, ratings, reviews, photo and video-sharing, blogs and social networking profiles called Personas. Pluck provides the Swift Communications digital team with a scalable platform and cross-site management capabilities, making it simple for the publisher to offer readers a comprehensive social media experience without additional resources.

“Regional publishers that serve local communities stand to reap extraordinary benefits from social media technologies,” said Dave Panos, CEO of Pluck and executive vice president of Demand Media. “Working with Swift Communications, we provide readers with new ways to connect with comprehensive information and perspectives on local topics of interest.”

Powering more than 2.5 billion monthly interactions, Pluck’s technology platform offers comprehensive social media capabilities broadly deployed on more than 250 leading digital destinations, including USA Today, Circuit City, The Dallas Cowboys, Scotts, The Washington Post and Discovery.

Gaia Online, the leading online hangout for teens, today announced an $11 million Series C round of venture funding from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). At a time when eMarketer is predicting the number of teen internet users visiting virtual worlds will jump from the reported 8.2 million users in 2007 to 20 million in 2011, Gaia Online is dedicated to bringing this growing audience rich and engaging experiences that are natural extensions of their real-life interests.

“Gaia Online is one of the most exciting companies that we have seen in the online social community space,” said Norm Fogelsong, a General Partner with Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), a premier later-stage investment firm. “The breadth of activity available on the site and the level of engagement of the users are truly extraordinary. It is a privilege to be involved with such a strong management team, one that is leading the way in virtual goods transactions. We feel that Gaia Online is poised for explosive growth.”

Since its inception in 2003, Gaia Online has grown to one of the largest and most active immersive online communities for teens and young adults. Each month more than 5 million unique users socialize, play games, watch movies in the virtual cinema and express their individuality and creativity through customizable avatars and profiles. Gaia Online has the highest average visit time among social networking websites, according to an April 2008 report by research group Hitwise. More than 350,000 Gaians log into Gaia Online each day, many of them participating in one of the most active forums on the Web with more than 1 billion posts to date. In June Gaia Online was named to TIME.com’s 50 Best Websites of 2008 list.

“Social networks and virtual worlds are constantly evolving as users become more involved and embedded, and at Gaia Online we are focused on bringing Gaians experiences they will not get anywhere else,” said Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online. “With this capital, we are excited to continue to deliver on this mission, while growing and developing new site elements to support the rapidly increasing interest in Gaia Online.”

Gaia Online has worked with companies such as Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nike, Skittles, Sony, Toyota, Warner Bros and Xbox, providing them with powerful and innovative branding opportunities with unparalleled reach and engagement within the teen and young adult audience. Recently the community announced the upcoming summer launch of its casual massively multiplayer online game (MMO). The free, flash-based MMO, in development since 2007, will give experienced and new users a fun way to play, socialize, and explore.