InterContinental hotels get staff to share mates’ rates – Springwise. if you know anyone who works for intercontinental you should hit them up for hotel discounts.

Building a Social Network Site in Rails | Jim Neath. big list of plugins you would find useful if you were building a social site.

AOL Buys Bebo For $850 Million. this wasn’t even news. dang.

Lovd By Less — Who loves you, baby?. rails based open source project for making social websites.

Babbel: Help Me, Help You Learn A New Language. techcrunch review on a web startup for learning languages. looks interesting.

Fraxi – a “Ning” For Digg Clones. ning lets you create your own social network on whatever topic you want. fraxi will let you create your own digg site on whatever topic you want.

Penthouse Buys AdultFriendFinder for $500 million – New York Times. why didn’t i think of that?

Springwise: Payout time for SellaBand fans. four bands on the site have sold enough albums to start paying back their crowdsourced investors. very cool.

Checkmate? MySpace To Join Google OpenSocial “Suddenly, within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game.”

Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web. Marc Anderseen talks about Google’s new Open Social framework for building shit for social apps. via ram.

Musical crowdfunding with SliceThePie. commit $15 to your favorite bands, bands that get $15K in funding record albums, SliceThePie gets $2 royalties on album sales, artists keep all rights, and fans that donated original get a cut as well.

Last.fm Facebook App Launches. mashable had like 10 stories of new facebook apps and a lot of them are review related. i wonder if facebook can become the default review site for just about anything.

Facebook Grows Up – An Analysis of Today’s News. seems facebook wants to be the platform for social apps. very interesting. via ram.

globeandmail.com: Grownups get their Facebook fix “Here in Canada, where nearly two million people are registered on Facebook, the number of users 25 to 34 years old has doubled every month this year.”

In the Computer Dating Game, Room for a Coach – New York Times. one person paid $2000 for online dating consultation. again, people have too much money.

Shelfari: Turning the lights on. a seattle-based social website for bookworms just got funding including some from Amazon.

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll — New York Magazine. this is probably the most interesting magazine article i’ve read in the last year. via 3rdparty.

Motley Fool CAPS. there’s been a lot of new “social” investing sites lately but I really like how this one is implemented.

RealTravel. user submitted travel blogs. there’s a lot of really great content on this site, both write-ups and photos. sidenote, i need to go to dubrovnik.

LonelyBloggers.com. priceless name. dating site for bloggers.