Exactly a year ago today, I closed the door of my flat in East Dulwich for the last time, pushed my keys back through the letterbox and began my life as the littlest e-hobo. Since then, according to my Dopplr account, I’ve flown enough miles to single-handedly warrant the building of a third runway at Heathrow. It’s lucky that I don’t offset my carbon because if I did, the world would be overrun by trees. And no one wants that.

It’s fitting perhaps that–52 weeks to the day after saying goodbye to London for the first time–I’m about to do it again. I’ve reached the end of a two week stay in town to take care of some admin and, most importantly, to finalise a deal to write a second me-me-memoir, this time about my bizarre adventures as a technomad. A sort of Drunk And Disorderly In Paris and Las Vegas, if you will. The fact that the deal is with the same publisher–even the same editor–as my previous book is a frankly damning indictment of the level of sane judgement to be found in modern publishing. Ask anyone who has worked with me in the past and they’ll tell you the last thing they want to do is make the same mistake again. I’m just going to put it down to an administrative error, keep my head down and hope no one at Orion House realises what the hell they’ve done.

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Facebook’s announcement that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates (and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate social gesture. You could see this coming if you were watching carefully. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social networking and will continue to be as far as I can tell, focused on morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to the status update as the primary user experience.

But Facebook did not invent the status update. I honestly don’t know where the status update started but for me it was AIM where I first was asked to leave a short note telling people what I was doing. I’ve heard Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, talk many times about his inspirations for Twitter and one of them was the status message in AIM.

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Social networks are front and center in the latest redesign of AOL’s AOL.com homepage, which the company announced Thursday and says it will start to gradually roll out to users over the next few weeks (unless they choose to opt in earlier).

A widget (or module, or gadget, or whatever you want to call it) on the new AOL.com features a tabbed interface with updates from five different social-networking and messaging services: AOL’s own AIM and Bebo, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook. Called “My Networks,” the tabs invite members to log into their social profiles and see a limited amount of information–feed and in-box updates from Facebook and MySpace, new Twitter messages, AIM status messages, etc.–as well as links to access the full versions of the apps.

The Facebook credentials, for example, come from the social network’s new Facebook Connect service, an extension of its developer API.

These are just the launch partners, AOL executive James Clark told CNET News last week, and more social-networking and messaging services will be added to the lineup over time. “(It’s) part of a consistent evolution of opening up,” Clark explained, pointing to AOL’s addition last month of outside email service alerts to AOL.com.

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It read like the teenage party from hell: a riot of sex and wanton damage fueled by underage drinking that only ended when the police arrived. According to media reports, the mother of the teenage hostess was so angry with her daughter that she punched her.

But Jodie Hudson’s lurid description of the party on the social networking website Bebo, subsequently carried in a number of national newspapers, turned out to be fantasy. The media stories, and the accompanying pictures taken from Bebo, are now the subject of a landmark legal case that could redraw the boundaries of the use of information published on social networking sites including Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.

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OK, the title may be a slight exaggeration, but the data from a new study by the social-contact search site Rapleaf is nonetheless interesting.

In what they claim is the largest social-network study ever done, Rapleaf looked at the social connections of both men and women. All told, they collected data from over 30 million people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Hi5 and others.

Interestingly, when you focus on users with fewer connections (well, relatively speaking–we’re talking about one group of people with between 1 and 100 connections, and another with between 100 and 1,000), women tend to have more friends than men. However, when you get to a really large number of connections (1,000 to 10,000, and also 10,000-plus), men have more friends.

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I’m not sure whether to call this data portability or just making it easier for social-networking services to spam a user’s contacts. But either way, Microsoft has announced partnerships with LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo and Facebook, to enable Windows Live Messenger users to look for contacts on either of the five social-networking sites and vice versa.

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There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Web site with eight games (chess, backgammon, sudoku, dominoes, bingo, spades, hearts and video poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets.

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Clouds are gathering over Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet companies. The sale of social-networking company Bebo comes at a time when private investors are changing their tune. They’re no longer pumping money into start-ups at the same huge valuations they were doing last year.

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Poor Bebo. I feel for the residents of their hip and convivial apartment block. It has just been bought by a slumlord.

AOL–which is paying $850 million for the social-networking site, the other Facebook–is where innovations go to die. Remember Netscape? Bought for $4.2 billion and now dead. AOL bought a mess of advertising platforms–Advertising.com, Quigo, Tacoda–and can’t make them to get along.

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AOL, the online division of Time Warner, is buying fast-growing social network Bebo for close to $850 million in cash, the company announced today. AOL is talking some gobbledygook about marrying AIM, ICQ with a real social network. Whatever!

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