Usenet is one of the oldest components of what later came to be known as "the internet". It's like a giant BBS or web forum, but decentralized. In fact, the whole idea of the WWW (and the "browser" necessary to read it) was announced in a newsgroup post.

Today, for the first time in recent memory, FriendFeed has experienced a major outage. Perhaps it's coincidence with the likes of Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) evangelizing FriendFeed on Twitter.

We really liked the ability to add a twitter widget to our site, but were wondering if the same could be done with FriendFeed. The answer of course is yes. Now it should be known that adding a FriendFeed widget to you iGoogle homepage is very easy and supported by FriendFeed. What you're about to see is not obvious though.

It has been all the rage these past couple of weeks. Social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace are "letting" users transfer their personal profiles to other websites. Why the big deal? And the bigger question, why is the common press printing stories about it?

We really have been enjoying all the positive e-mail and comments we’re receiving here at the Collective Identity headquarters. It’s obvious that there are many of you who really enjoy the site's content. Because we know you’re there, we’re going to ask for your help.

What do you get when you take one part RSS News Reader and one part Social Network? The minds behind FriendFeed decided to find out.

Google has launched a new developer sandbox that reveals some really interesting goodies. That is to say it is now a given that social networking is coming to iGoogle very soon. For those who don't already use iGoogle, it is a landing page for your web browser. It is very customizable with widgets and rss feeds and all in all very useful.

Now and again I struggle for a good working definition for Social Networking. There was a time when Social Networking simply meant knowing people in real life so that you could call on them if you needed something. You would go to parties, get introduced, participate in clubs or sports, and generally be friendly. The bigger your rolodex was the better.

Once again twitter users have been suffering through the growing pains at http://twitter.com. This time it's an issue where updates from people you are following might not appear in your personal timeline.

I've experienced this, but the interesting thing is that these updates do get delivered to my instant messaging client. Twitter has not issued an ETA for the fix, but they are making assurances that nothing is being lost.

Here is a list of interesting books related to collective identity and social networking. Each of these were in some way catalysts to the explosion and hype we're seeing today. I invite each of you to read these books and discuss them in these forums. And if you have some additional reading suggestions, please feel free to post those suggestions here in the comments.