VentureBeat

Social.im is an instant messaging service that turns your Facebook friends — and potentially friends on any social network — into IM contacts.

In other words, you don’t need to use a standard IM client such as AIM or GTalk, you can rely on your social network. First, you download Social.im software to your desktop. The software connects to Facebook’s servers, identifies your friends there and displays them in an IM-like list. You can start IM-ing with friends from Facebook once they’ve also downloaded the client.

Michael Arrington has an early look, here. We have a few more details from the company. Social.im is a new product from the team and company behind Mogad, a San Francisco web content discovery company we first covered here.

Hank Barry is an investor, as is Peter Thiel and early Googlers Aydin Senkut and Georges Harik.

Social.im shows you other information from Facebook, such as new wall posts and messages. It is only available on Windows now, and I’m on a Mac, so I haven’t had the chance to try it out. The company says the Mac version is coming soon.

Yesterday, I looked at a few other applications that were extracting data outside of Facebook and Bebo (which uses a similar developer platform) in interesting ways.

Social.im is positioned to be a nifty app. It plans to also turn Bebo contacts into Social.im contacts, once Bebo opens up its platform to more developers as planned.
Social.im will integrate with other social networks as those sites open up, and even other IM services like Meebo. It’s easy to imagine a list of friends from all the social networks you’re in, appearing within its desktop application.

Mogad is the latest startup building a peer-recommendation web service, similar to Facebook’s “news feed” feature.

Unlike Facebook’s closed system, however, Mogad wants to be a “news feed” for the whole web, that can give you recommendations from anything they do. For example, if you’re purchasing a book, Mogad will show you what books your friends are most interested in.

This field is a daunting one, because it’s filled with players. Plaxo’s social network, Pulse, Forbes’ newly-purchased Clipmarks and a number of other sites are working on variations of this same idea. However, Mogad says none of the existing players have provided an adequate way to securely select and invite your friends and control what they’re seeing from you.

Mogad is still in early days, and it’s almost premature to point people to its site — the company is planning a wider launch in the next couple weeks.

It hits the radar mainly because it has just received a first round of investment of half a million dollars from former Google employee Aydin Senkut, who manages Felicis Ventures, and angel investors Peter Thiel and Georges Harik.

The San Francisco-based company uses a browser plugin to collect information about what you and your friends are viewing, then it makes recommendations about things you might find interesting: articles, videos, and so on. It uses both explicit recommendations from your friends and its own software to figure out what you’ll most want to see.

See screenshots below. The plugin has two buttons: One that shows you what friends who have joined Mogad have recommended and one that allows you to send a recommendation to your friends.

For example, if you want to share a part of an article, you can select text from an article and send the text and a link to your Mogad friends.

Mogad offers a range of privacy settings so you can choose to allow only friends or yourself to see what it collects. You can also share your Mogad’ed items with the public on Mogad’s site — or turn the thing off completely if you have very private browsing to do. If need be, you can delete whatever Mogad collects from you.

The plugin is only available for Firefox now, but the company is also working on an Internet Explorer browser plugin.

The company’s founders have computer science backgrounds. One founder, Blake Commagere, a recent Plaxo employee, also developed the popular Facebook third-party applications Zombies and Vampires. Yanda Erlich used to work in product management in both Google’s advertising and consumer web products divisions.

Senkut, who has invested in a number of companies, says this is the first time he will join a company’s board.