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About a year after the launch of Orkut, according to News.com, Dodgeball the Social Networking service announced with a notice on their Homepage that as of Wednesday this week they were acquired by Google.

From what I see, Dodgeball is like a mobile version of Friendster. Tell them where you are via a mobile device and they’ll tell you who’s nearby, which is a really cool concept. The service takes social networking and integrates an almost GPS sort of functionality which is a pretty obvious next step for these “people connector” sorts of services.

I really havn't played with Orkut or Dodgeball personally, but I can see a pattern emerging after the Yahoo360 launch and now these Googles moves. How long until MSN comes out with more social networking features for Spaces and Messenger? Not long I would assume….

I read this article on Technology Review that correlates the logical association between gaming and the community building benefits of Blogs. Not to mention just the community building aspects of a Publisher hosted blog, but imagine every monthly subscriber to World of Warcraft being provided a blog to share their woes, tears, successes, and enjoyment of their gaming experience. Not to mention the fact a gamer who has a top character always wants to showcase what they have built, and what better trophy case than a game branded web presence that is easy to use and can track and hold descriptions of raids, screenshots, videos, and even podcasts or videocasts of gaming on the fly. Guild blogs, character blogs, storyline blogs… all of these networking and communicating together all the while reinforcing the awareness of the game and the publisher is a strong value proposition that I can see emerging just over the horizon.

As an avid part time gamer myself and  having experience with such titles as Earth and Beyond which has been cancelled for some time now, EVE, Guild Wars, Lineage, and currently Matrix Online, I know the amount of dedication players of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) give to their game of choice. There is even a website dedicated to the realm of MMORPGs that discusses what is coming and what is the best rated today.

When a gaming publisher that generally acquires revenue from monthly subscription fees looks for that next big differentiator to their competition in this highly competitive market, it will be interesting to see how long it takes for one of these providers to take the next logical step from the chaotic tough to follow forums that do not support RSS that most provide today, to a Game blog, and eventually a Blog offering for every subscriber.

What better vehicle for providing this feature than an outsourced fully wholesale and completely brandable best of breed blogging solution than Blogware? There is none…

So according to Mediaweek, AOL has finally released AOL Journals, their formerly internet access subscriber only blogging tool, to the general AIM member public. Past AIM, this is really the only core service AOL has released to general internet surfers without requiring the payment for Internet Access.

In my opinion, this shows that AOL believes that Blogging is as big or even bigger of an opportunity than IM, and highlights one of their points of differentiation in the blogosphere as moblogging. Moblogging is a very powerfull application and has been a staple of subscription generating premium services such as Blogware.

A basic tool from what I have seen past the moblogging and AIM integration which you would expect from a free offering, but no advertising yet so it will be interesting to see how they propose to monetize this offering as opposed to the “me too” nature of this launch after the Microsoft Spaces, Google Blogger, and Yahoo 360 entries into this market.

 What an article, they even copied the chronological structure of a blog for the print! Could this be the future of all hard copy layouts? Maybe not, but what they believe is that if you are a business, and you are not blogging in some way shape or form, you will have a very difficult time competing online.

While the traditional web catalogues what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds.

“I'm amazed people don't get it yet,” says Jeff Weiner, senior vice-president who heads up search, “Never in the histroy of market research has there been a tool like this”

Definitely worth more than a read.. maybe even your first blog post… They did…