In a series of announcements today at a press event in San Francisco, Apple made clear that it is planning to build its own social networking features. But how big are its social aspirations? The new version of Apple’s iOS software, 4.1, is due out next week, and it will include the Game Center, a social network service designed specifically for mobile games. That’s been in the works for awhile, and is relatively simple — more surprising is Ping, Apple’s new music social network, designed for iTunes.

Apple is following its familiar playbook of vertical integration by combining hardware, software and now social network.

Is Apple looking to build its own social platform now? Aside from a simple integration in Ping, Facebook is absent in these latest launches, as are all other third party social networking services, like Twitter or MySpace.

I also like Hulu. They offer a useful service and nice viewing experience. But their selection can be a lot better. They are struggling to find a sustainable business model. They are owned by major networks, and in spite (no, ironically, because) of that they seem to have major restrictions on what they can carry and how and where they can be played. Networks are worried about Hulu cannibalizing their revenues and therefore suffocating it.

How come Netflix seem to negotiate these tricky licensing deals much better than Hulu? It’s called Leverage. Netflix is making boat loads of money while Hulu doesn’t. That makes all the difference in the tale of these two companies.

Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete their IPO process, says one of our more reliable sources. We have not been able to confirm this rumor one way or another via other sources, which isn’t surprising. A company in lock down during the IPO process is usually even more tight lipped than normal.

But if true this would be one very big acquisition. Skype insiders are hoping for an out of the gate valuation of $5 billion or so, we’ve heard. Presumably Cisco would have to bidding in that range to make it interesting.

Google was also rumored to be sniffing around Skype, but antitrust concerns may have persuaded them not to make an actual offer.

Cisco has done a great job with WebEx. This would be a similar but much bigger play. It makes sense for Cisco and would provide nice returns for Andereesen and his freinds.

LONDON – It weighs in at more than 130 pounds, but the authoritative guide to the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, may eventually slim down to nothing. Oxford University Press, the publisher, said Sunday so many people prefer to look up words using its online product that it’s uncertain whether the 126-year-old dictionary’s next edition will be printed on paper at all.

The digital version of the Oxford English Dictionary now gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers, who pay $295 a year for the service in the U.S. In contrast, the current printed edition — a 20-volume, 750-pound ($1,165) set published in 1989 — has sold about 30,000 sets in total.

It’s just one more sign that the speed and ease of using Internet reference sites — and their ability to be quickly updated — are phasing out printed reference books. Google and Wikipedia are much more popular research tools than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and dozens of free online dictionaries offer word meanings at the click of a mouse. Dictionary.com even offers a free iPhone application.

The story begins in 1996 with an 18-year-old college dropout named Scott Banister, who came up with a simple but elegant concept that turned out to be one of the best business ideas in history.

This is the true story of the search business model — a concept that John Battelle and other search historians have erroneously attributed to Bill Gross for Goto.com. Although Gross deserves the lion’s share of credit for recognizing a good idea and more importantly for implementing it, the credit for developing the idea itself belongs elsewhere.

An interesting read.

Just five years ago we all thought Google owned the web and no one can take it away from them. Now they are playing catch up to Facebook and Apple in social web and mobile web respectively. It is funny how quickly things can change.

Entertainment is being reshaped by these two trends. The next frontier in  entertainment is Social Gaming. And it is just getting started.

Facebook has 500M  active users and is still growing strong. Fifty percent of FB users play games. Nearly half the time spent on social networks is spent on playing social games. American spend more time on games than email.

But we are only in the stone ages of social games. For gods sake, farmville is the state of the art in social games today.

NYT recently asked: Is Zynga the new Google? Let me put it this way. Remember Altavista?

We will see tremendous innovation in social gaming both on the web and mobile. We ain’t seen nothin yet!

In a couple years we will look back at farmville, fishville, frontierville etc. and will have a good laugh. There will be some new players making it big in the space.

Facebook now controls the social gaming platform on the web as does Apple on the mobile with its iphone & appstore.

Google has android to counter Apple. How about its counter for facebook? Google is working on a gaming social network competitor to Facebook named Google Me (they need to come up with a better name for starters).

They assigned Vic Gundothra (their former mobile head) to lead Google Me. They bought slide and made Max Levchin, a VP of Engineering. Today Google bought an obscure startup called Angstro, mainly to bring in respected web technologist Rohit Khare.

I think Google should stop messing around and acquire Hi5, a gaming focused social network and use it as a base to build Google Me. Oh, keep the name Hi5 (it is much better than google me).

It should be interesting to watch the social gaming space over the next 2 to 3 years. Strap on your seat belts. It is going to be a wild ride!

he founders of Facebook aren’t the only game-changing geeks poised to have their story told on a movie screen. Michael London’s Groundswell Productions has teamed with producer John Morris to acquire movie rights to the Ken Auletta book Googled: The End of the World As We Know it. They will use the book as the blueprint for a feature film that tells the story of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the fast rise of the juggernaut web business that made them billionaires.

The book was published last fall by Penguin. Auletta, the media columnist for The New Yorker, chronicled a business that grew into a search engine-driven octopus whose $20 billion in ad revenue last year was more than the major broadcast networks combined. CEO Eric Schmidt predicted to Auletta that Google will become the world’s first $100 billion media company.