It has taken about ten months longer then we had planned, but CircleBuilder.com has finally closed its seed round of funding. The convertible debt has become equity priced at a dollar a share and it's gone up in value, at least on paper. However, that value is not liquid, so is not worth discussing.

Before I go further, I should disclose that I am on the Advisory Board of the company and was one of the early investors. Many of my posts are written as an "adventure in investorland" relating my own experiences. For those who feel this is too promotional, you can turn away. My purpose is to share the journey of an insider as this company builds.

There was little certainty that CircleBuilder would be a success when we started. Along the way, I have had some reservations about the financial and time commitment; I do not need one more thing to do, or a way to lose money.

When we started, MySpace was all the rage and Facebook was gaining momentum rapidly. The founders, Howard Brown and Brent Cohen, came to me with an idea to develop a social networking site catering to religious communities that were not well served by the free-for-all, anything-goes nature of existing alternatives.

With the popularity of Facebook, bebo and MySpace, companies are trying to find ways to leverage social networking. However, it can be expensive to build out a strong platform.

Well, things are getting easier; that is, Ringside Networks has launched an open source server to build social networks (it's in the beta mode).

True, there are other systems on the market. However, in the case with Ringside, it allows for seamless integration with other sites, such as Facebook. In other words, it will help companies migrate users to their own platform.

What's more, Ringside allows companies to keep their own branding and the look-and-feel of their own websites.

Oh, and some of the co-founders of Ringside -- Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman and Mark Lugert -- were instrumental in the development of JBoss, which turned out to be one of the most successful open source projects in tech history.

To get some perspective on this, I talked to David DePaolo, who operates WorkCompCentral.com. He has known about Ringside for some time. His take: "It makes sense that someone would start this up as they have with other technologies, and just in time. As technology progresses, we find that it is not all about the technology and patents, it's the application of that technology to a specific market."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

Rupert Murdoch, head of media conglomerate News Corp (NYSE: NWS) has decided to open up the software platform underlying his huge social network, MySpace. According to Reuters, "It will allow outside developers further access to its service to counter the growth of smaller rival Facebook." Most internet audience measurement services show that Facebook has been closing the gap with MySpace.

Murdoch also tempered expectations for huge revenue growth at his social network. "At the same time, Murdoch signaled lower expectations for MySpace revenue in the company's 2008 fiscal year ending in June, suggesting it may not reach a previous forecast of over $800 million," Reuters adds.

MySpace still has about twice as many registered users as its rival, 110 million to Facebook's 47 million. But, both numbers are mind-bending.

Perhaps the most important piece of information from Murdoch is an admission that getting advertising revenue from social networks is very, very difficult. MySpace will yield less than $200 million a quarter, while also-ran search engine and portal Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) is bringing in about seven times that number.

Social networks may drive traffic, but they don't drive dollars.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com

In one of the worst moves by a large pharma company in recent memory, Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) is tying up with doctor social network Sermo. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Pfizer-affiliated doctors will be able to talk candidly with the site's 31,000 members, potentially giving the company insights into prescribing patterns and a way to show doctors data on its drugs."

The paper points out that there is some risk in the move because the FDA and other federal agencies watch drug company communications with doctors very carefully. But Pfizer has cut its sales force and the internet may be a way for the company to do some not so subtle marketing.

The part of the plan that is really flawed is that Sermo could become a platform for groups of doctors to mount powerful criticisms of Pfizer drugs or offer clinical evidence that pending or current drugs may represent unacceptable risks to patients. In other words, the social network could undo as many sales as it makes for the big drug company.

It is Pandora's Box that Pfizer will wish it has not opened.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Every year or so, some old roommate or a close friend's fiancee or somebody drags me onto yet another social networking site like a kid pulled off the bleachers at a middle school dance. This year, it was the very popular Facebook, one of the web's hottest private properties, which Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has appraised somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 billion clams.

From my charming, handsome Facebook profile, you can get a pretty solid idea of my consumer habits, or at least the habits of the consumer I want you to think I am (Do I secretly love Nicholas Sparks novels? Do I burn through fungal creams? I'll never te-- I mean NO! No. Of course not!). I spill all my beans -- what I do with my free time, what books I read, what CDs I dig on, what TV shows I'd TiVo ... if I had a TiVo ... or a television. And I've never been private about it. Through the MySpaces and the Friendsters -- even ten years ago on my HotWired.com member page (remember these?) -- all that choice information has always been there since the beginning.

And, lucky me, so has the University of Phoenix. Why, when I log on to Facebook in the year 2007, is glorious old UoP still hassling me to go get my GED or whatever learn-at-home hustle it's running, particularly when the actual, genuine university that graduated me way back when is right there on the page, pulsing in Carolina blue beneath my favorite hilarious and insightful quotes?

Just the sentence "Google will soon be irrelevant" is sure to set off a firestorm of conversation and arguments. The company's death grip on the information most of us rely on daily to function in the internet age is well-known, and Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) brand has managed to infiltrate so many areas so quickly it's mind-boggling. But, the company's inability to adapt quickly to the soaring popularity of social search (think Facebook and Mahalo, a new 'human-powered' search engine) may be its popularity downfall, according to well-known blogger Robert Scoble.

Will Google's automatically-generated search results and website indexing practices be overtaken by the ability of real people to produce similar chunks of information that are more personally relevant? It's hard to imagine that happening any time soon due to Google's enormous popularity and usage from billions of web surfers every year. Just like any commodity, customers eventually prefer more customized and personalized result, and web usage will be no different. But make no mistake -- Google is working feverishly to ensure its bread-n-butter search engine becomes as personally attached to each Google customer as possible. Is that enough?

Scoble does put forth an interesting question: what is the future of search? Will it be using a mobile phone or PC to find things we're looking for in the most local and personal way possible by means of highly relevant search results? That would be the easy answer based on the natural evolution of the way many of us use internet search today. That doesn't make it guaranteed, though -- and whoever discovers the "next version of search" could indeed threaten Google. Then again, Google's brand will be incredibly hard to dethrone, just like any entrenched household name.

News Corp.'s (NYSE:NWS) MySpace site is filled with fake friends.

I'm not talking about deceitful adolescents and twentysomethings. These people pretend -- usually not very well -- that they find you fascinating for commercial purposes. They are in the oh-so-friendly fields of Web cam entertainment and mortgage sales.

As an adult who set up a MySpace profile for journalistic purposes, I can laugh this off. But it got me to wondering that if these sleezeballs were targettng me, than who must be going after the site's target demographic.

MySpace, is starting to respond to critics by offering free parental monitoring software, according to the Wall Street Journal. Its code named "Zephyr." (Again, I make my plea to corporate America to quit with these stupid code names!.)

Parents who use the software can monitor their home computers to find out the name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace, the newspaper said. The Journal added that parents won't be able to read their child's email or see their profile pages and children will know when their information is being shared.

Is this the best MySpace can do? I know the site doesn't want to alienate its users, but any responsible parent is going to want to read their child's MySpace email or profile without them knowing about it. Honestly, the company will have to figure something better out fairly quickly. Investors should be worried too since so much is at stake.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is pressuring the site to verify the ages of its users. The excuses that MySpace is giving for not being more vigilant about ages aren't convincing.

"Privately, News Corp. officials and others in the industry say that age verification is difficult to implement for kids under the age of 18, because they often lack a driver's license or other government-issued identification," The Journal says. "It can be done with parental permission slips -- but it's not always easy to verify the relationship between a parent and a child, and MySpace could be legally liable for mistakes."

I thought technology companies liked solving these sorts of problems.

MySpace may be the space of the moment, receiving praise, aplomb and (most importantly) generating traffic to Google in ever-greater numbers, but it's not even the middle of the social network craze. Really, the whole social network effect, as a theory and a technological practicality, started with the personal web sites of the early nineties. Personal web sites beget blogs beget networking sites like Orkut and LinkedIn beget MySpace, AIM Pages, YouTube, and whatever's to come next.

Thanks to a effort by white shoe management consultancy McKinsey to get the great minds of YouTube, Yahoo! and the like together with the old garde of the gigantic media (and I'm asking myself, and Aaron Cohen of Bolt Media, who was interviewed as a person of knowledge for the Financial Times piece: whither side of the old/new divide does Time Warner fall?), social networking is now coming into the good graces of the giants of Wall Street and Hollywood and Madison Avenue and all those places where fashion and money meet the people.

Robert Young, writing for GigaOm, calls MySpace the "it girl," and describes the infatuation with "her" and her groupies this way: "nearly every media company and venture capital fund on the planet is out on the dance floor stumbling over one another to see if they can identify the next breathless social networking beauty."