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Nokia has bought Plazes for an undisclosed amount. Plazes is a German location-aware social network site,  which basically lets users know where their friends are.

As discussed at mashup*’s Being Digital last week, location is a really hot topic right now, with everyone in the industry having a go at creating a location/mobile/social network mashup (although most do seem to be getting it all wrong!) and this will no doubt increase even further with the iPhone 3G. Predictions can easily be made that whoever is able to master this and create a useful service with an easy to use interface - and most importantly, of course, monetises this - is going to reap in the rewards. Nokia’s acquisition shows that they too are on the path to creating a location-aware service.

While many users are looking forward to use location based services, it appears that many aren’t keen to expose their location and trade in their privacy, and this will inevitably raise concerns for the success of these services. Apparently, Plazes’ CEO Felix Petersen was caught somewhere else than he was supposed to be - and I’m sure many of us wouldn’t like to be put in the situation where our partner/friends/family/colleagues can see where we are all the time. Think about that sneaky ’sick’ day at work when you have tickets to an event that you can’t just can’t miss! Or when you want a quiet, relaxing night in at home, so you tell your friend that you can’t babysit because you are going out. Or when you tell your partner you have to work late, but you go out with your friends instead. (By the way, I don’t do any of these things…they are just examples…)

Whatever users think about location-aware services, they are definitely something that we are going to be hearing a lot more about over the rest of 08.

This week has seen hi5 become a victim of their own success, as their runaway growth has come with some some growing pains.

Over the last month, third-party developers have launched over 400 OpenSocial apps on hi5’s network. These apps have has faster adoption rates than those on any other social network. The hi5 platform has averaged at around a million application installs every day and around half of hi5’s 80 million members have engaged with three or more installed apps.

Mashable spoke to hi5 developers to find out the secrets to their success - the short version being that they just put together a really solid service and happened to quickly tap into a broad cross-section of countries. Their really impressive application statistics are continually attributed to their uniquely international userbase.

However, their success has come with some growing pains and Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has told Mashable: “Hi5 for a brief period turned off all platform notifications. However, Hi5 has since restored platform notification service to developers by making some changes to the way notifications work. Specifically, notifications are now processed asynchronously.  Hi5 will be continuing conversations with developers that are using notifications the most.”

See the full Mashable blog and hear their conversation at: http://mashable.com/2008/04/29/hi5-growth/

We are currently working on a really cool project for one of our clients, featuring Wasabo man and his friends! Who is Wasabo man?! Watch this space and all will be revealed…

Stable Media, LLC has teamed up with Wyndstorm to create riplounge - the upcoming virtual world for social networking. The beta version of which launched earlier this week.

The past few years has seen the launch of loads of virtual worlds. Some of the more recent have had a blatant approach to self-promotion, but most people would rather have an ad-supported virtual world, with digital banners and commercial-ridden video clips, than a downloadable tool that requires their credit-card number. Riplounge may not be the most obvious plug for advertising, but it will be another running experiment for finding the best way in which advertisers can leverage social networks that operate within the realms of a virtual world. And these types of experiments can only benefit the industry.

As a social network, riplounge has better-than-most privacy controls, profiles, avatars, various locations for you to visit such as yachts and night clubs, and certain social actions that you can take with other users on the site, such as flirting and hold hands -  all the things that avatars are supposed to do.

The various virtual locations will be used as multimedia channels for content distribution and advertising purposes. For instance, the night club could have a virtual DJ release a new song. It’s the interactive and custom options that spin off from such promotions that will provide value to the users on the other end of riplounge - so it will be really interesting to see what Sable Media plans to do towards this end.

MySpace and MTV are teaming up to launch a weekly show called “The MySpace Chart” on MTV2. According to The Guardian, the companies are launching a website, which will allow MySpace users to stream a variety of music videos for free. The MySpace Chart show launches on March 16th and will air videos based on the votes cast on the new site.

The move marks another collaboration between the most popular teenage social network and the TV network tailored to them. The two companies previously combined forces for the Presidential Candidate Dialogue Series. MTV is owned by Viacom, while MySpace is owned by rival media company News Corp.

It also reflects the emerging trend that charts from social music sites are starting to cross-over into mainstream media. In addition to the new MySpace/MTV initiative, iLike has teamed up with Billboard, while Last.fm has a partnership with BBC.