Some interesting developments on the social networking front:

The New York Times (NYT) (via Adriana's Furl feed):
'...the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.'

The NYT article, worth reading in full (requires registration), pretty much coincided with this piece of news (via Jeff Jarvis):

Reuters starts a MySpace for stock-pickers. Said Reuters head Tom Glocer: “It won’t have the latest hot videos and the ‘why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys’ blogs. Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models.”

And then, of course, there is Ning – create your own social network for whatever takes you fancy (via Bloggers Blog).

There's an interesting trend or two evolving here, especially on the corporate side, but I have yet to be convinced that people will have the time, or desire, to participate in all these social networks. A network of stock-pickers sharing their research would indeed be a valuable network, but why would the more experienced and established stock-pickers bother? Not to mention the issue of time: it's a very valuable, and scarce, commodity for many of us, which means there's a limit to how many social networks a busy professional possibly can be a part of, especially if it were to become a trend for all big companies to have their very own social networks...