Evidently there is a lot of money to be made from owning a social bookmarking website! However in the past many people have been put off setting up competing sites or even niche sites because the development costs alone can run in to the tens of thousands of dollars.

But if you choose a ready made social bookmarking script such as Agriya’s MarkIt you are saving yourself time, effort and money, not to mention the fact that you could be up and running within hours of buying this software. The benefits don’t end there either because MarkIt has all the same features of the top social bookmarking sites and more. Your users can even download a Firefox toolbar to instantly bookmark websites.

One thing to be aware of though is if you want to create a social bookmarks website then taking on the likes of Furl, Delicious and Digg is probably not going to get you very far. Choosing an appropriate niche is the key, so you could start a website about a particular sport where people can post news stories, rumours and forum discussions that are related to that sport. So if we took soccer and looked at all the rumours surrounding Christiano Ronaldo, your social bookmarking site about soccer could become the place to go to get a round up of all the stories about this sensational footballer.

Obviously soccer is just an example, but there are thousands of other untapped niches which you can exploit and cash in on by using social bookmarking software.

You can create a social bookmarking website with MarkIt

MarkIt costs just $87 and comes with more features than any other bookmarking script (or major website!). Find out more

Nor do you have to make concessions on the type of features because when you choose software like iSocial it comes with all the same features as you are likely to find in Facebook, Orkut and Hi5. With groups, online chat, profile pages, photo albums, videos and more you get everything the ‘big boys’ get for a fraction of the price.

Although most social networking software does everything that the major players can do, you might need to customize the design or add some of your own features specific to your requirements. For example you might need to add some geo-location feature or integration with SMS. Regardless, iSocial is very easy to customize since it is built using PHP and mySQL (just like Facebook!) and has an external templating system which means you don’t have to be a programmer to change the layout and design.

To make iSocial and even more compelling choice to power your social network, it has Open Social integrated which means that all the apps that have been built for sites like Orkut and MySpace can also run on your website! You can create your own Developer Network for your social network and since iSocial uses Open Social for the external applications, there are already tens of thousands of developers who can start creating applications for your site right away.

iSocial lets you create your own social networking software

So while you might not want to create an exact Facebook Clone, using ready made social networking software can save you a lot of time, money and frustration compared with developing a site from scratch.

If we thought that Facebook and other social networking applications, outraged our privacy, that sounds so old next to what geolocation services are able to do. The US government is quickly trying to catch up with protecting the rights of the citizens affected by these new services. It can’t be long before advertising services try to geo-locate you to serve you advertisements for the place you are in at any point. But now, if everyone can find you – you could be in trouble with the government, or with your job for it – if you can’t ever keep your life to yourself. And will the police be allowed to check on your location if you forget to turn off that function when you are on the run? Do they have the right? All these will be thrashed out, over the coming years as privacy begins to be defined as has never been imagined before.

Meanwhile, there are major new services jumping on the bandwagon all the time. Google Chrome’s latest version, uses a new kind of geolocation. It looks at your WiFi network, and all the ones around you to determine where you are. And the most anticipated entry in the arena is Facebook – as it plans to announce at its f8 developer conference. Facebook has been trying to get this feature right for about a year now, and has included location sharing regulations on its boilerplate. App makers are now going to be able to make use of the Facebook location API to get some real useful functions out there.

But Facebook isn’t really trying to steal market share from established players like Foursquare. In fact, Facebook plans to make use of all the location services, to present them all on its network. What Facebook seems most interested in, over destroying any startup’s business model, is in trying to gain advertising share from Google. Facebook has had revamped business pages for months now, in hopes of enticing small business advertisers away from Google. Google’s Latitude is a great competing service in this area.

With breakout services like FourSquare, and Gowalla leading the charge, and now with Twitter and Facebook getting in on the act, one has to wonder, if geolocation as a market really big enough to take all this action? To begin with, there are at least 50 new geolocation services coming up right now. And that is on top of the players that make it crowded market as it is. But some of them can be quite useful. Take the Twitter app SitBy.Us. If you are at a conference for a festival, it lets you see exactly where everyone is, physically.

Vicariously is another. It collects check-ins across all kinds of services around the city, to give you the exact locations of the people you’re interested in. It is quite Beta as of now though, as it isn’t really reliable. Or take AOL Lifestream – you don’t have to track specific people on it, you just need to check out the location you’re interested in, and it’ll give you the names of everyone who was there. And it works with Foursquare. So there are alliances forming already; and this can’t be a really good thing. There are so many competing services, that people will probably miss out on check-ins on a service other than one’s own. These geolocation services just need to get together and share their data, before the market gets too fragmented. Gowalla for instance, isn’t readily available on any of these third-party services. Google of course, has an answer – GeoRSS. As you could probably well imagine, the service aggregates information from all the location services for any given place.

When geolocation really takes off, we’re going to get used to a new way to look at a representation of our neighborhoods on the Internet. And if people are not to lose interest, new applications will have to keep coming in. But these innovators are going to have to offer new ways to people harness all the information. Facebook and Twitter could be answer to this problem. They are entering the geolocation space soon; and after the really throw their weight behind their vision of getting every service to come together.

Conferences and trade expositions are such difficult places to keep track of people in, that conference organizers quickly realized how useful a tool Twitter could be in sending out thoughts and messages to groups of people all at once; and to use the ubiquitous Twitter hash tag for this. For instance, if you are attending a medical conference called UniMed, you just need to add #Uni or something to the end of each one of your tweets, and right away, everyone who is tuned in to that hash tag, reads you.

Twitter is also great as a way to know what is around you in places you travel, or go to. Twitter now allows you to search for trending topics, for whatever geographical area you are in. There are apps for Twitter with names like Twitter Local, that allow you to look for tweets coming out of places close to you. And if you want to find out what happen to be the most discussed topics in the area you are in, you could check out Happn.in.

And of course, all this leads up to how you can participate yourself one day. A good way to participate, if you feel you have something to actually contribute, is to simply ask the question. To set the ball rolling, you could ask a question on a popular topic that people are sure to have strong opinions on. For instance, you could ask people if watching the Academy Awards ceremony, is as hip as it once was. Or, if there is a strange physical symptom that is bothering you, you could put out a question about it on twitter, and watch wonderful inputs for and by the truckload. Twitter is what you make it to be. And the best part is, it’s greatest uses, probably haven’t even been discovered yet.

At most times, this could be the perfect way to break the ice with someone. The moment you learn someone’s name, you can look him or her up from your Facebook account on your mobile, and walk up with a great line like, ” Oh I seem to recognize your name; aren’t you friends with my colleague from work? I’ve heard so much about you”. And if you meet a stranger who’s a little more with it in the social networking scene, you could even have a little fun, and explore what friends you have in common. Once they know that they have a certain number of friends in common with you, they absolutely will have to take you on too. Twitter could never do something like this; Twitter is about following people, and not about being friends with someone.

No other service grows at a half-million new members a day; pretty soon,you could be looking up people in a room, not just by who they know in common with you, but what interests they share with you. If you catch someone at a party about whom you get an alert for Facebook that he enjoys the music of the same rock group you do, you are in business.

But Facebook is not done with tweaking its own ReTweeting feature. They’ve just released a Facebook feature called Via. It lets you repost something a friend shared with you, and it stamps the originator’s name on it with a Via attribution. It’s online already; you just need to pick up an item a friend has posted in your News Feed, and click on the Share button. You’ll get a Via option here with the name of the original friend stamped on it. When you finish sharing it, it will show up on your profile, with a link that goes to your friend’s profile too. Your friends will also find them on their News Feeds, and that is the closest thing to the ReTweet that you can imagine.

But Via Is only useful for links that someone’s posted. You can’t Via a status update, or your picture for instance. But it’s a first step, and it could evolve. They have the most useful kind of reposting feature up now with the link reposting ability, and that is what counts. Facebook will probably have a service like Tweet meme tracking how far a reposting of anything goes, and it could make Facebook really valuable in a world where instant real-time search is becoming deeply mainstream.

Google has been in the news (and when hasn’t it) this past week for holding its ground in taking the moral high road in not submitting to China’s demands in censorship. Google’s announced pullout from China has earned it quite a shine for its reputation. It’s dignified walkout in China has done more for its business than just earn it a good name though. China’s Baidu search engine is no longer just a Google copycat making do with scraps in the dark. Baidu happens to be bigger even than Bing, and will easily soon overtake Yahoo to be number two after Google. Baidu now has 20% of the search market worldwide, not just in China.

If you really want to tabulate search market shares, how can you do it when you ignore the soon-to-be number-two player? With China’s search market losing Google, the market share that is now up for grabs iss already being carved up by other local Chinese players in search. China’s Internet businesses seem set to become great competition to Google for everything on the Internet, valuable Internet company acquisitions included. The other American search companies hardly seem primed for aggressive market positioning anyway. The fear now is that,China could end up owning valuable Internet properties in the US, and that that would be a blow to Internet freedom.

Anyone at all can see your status updates too, because that is the default position you chose. And if you have certain search settings in place, anyone just searching on the Internet, can see all that information appear in their general search listings too. But to change this to something more sensible is not difficult. You just need to go to the “Profile Information” setting under the Settings menu, and make sure that the Posts by Me parameter is set to Only Friends.

How about getting your personal data off Google? When you bring up the Search Settings page on Facebook, you get a message that tells you that there has been a malicious rumor abroad that leads people to believe that Facebook information is all spilled out on Google. Facebook assures you that this is not true. Nothing could be more misleading. Because Facebook’s Public Search setting in the Search Settings page, lays down what exactly you’re putting out on Google. If you have Allow selected, all information you have on Facebook that you chose to share with “Everyone” goes out on Google. You will need un select Allow to to get a reasonable bit of privacy back.

The forums are on fire with how irresponsible of Facebook it was to throw your personal information so quickly to everyone with an Internet connection. No doubt, quite a few people found their marriages breaking up, and found themselves losing their jobs because information and pictures they thought was private on their Facebook pages, was suddenly all hung out for the world to see.

Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.

All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.