Dave says Google is working on a competitor to Facebook.   I wonder if this will be Orkut v2, or if they’ll be releasing something completely knew.   I would imagine its something completely new. Who uses Orkut anymore? I imagine if it weren’t for the Brazilian users it would be long gone by now.
Anyways, hopefully Dave is right and it will be an “open” social network, in the sense that they’ll make it easy to sync your data in and out.  I use Facebook regularly, but how many Zombie vs Vampires or Ninja vs Pirate applications do we really need? Are there any 3rd parties working on useful apps for Facebook?
Hopefully the next social network to hit the scene will offer a powerful API to allow the create on non-trivial applications. There is a lot of interesting data I’d love to play with in both my Facebook and LinkedIn social networks. Web of Trust alone would be an awesome application, but theres plenty more we could do with that kind of data about our social and professional circles.