If you are interested in kids and social software (or the future of persistent worlds, or the internal economics thereof) then Neopets is something you can't ignore. With, at the time of this posting, over 61 million registrations and almost 92 million pets created, it is by far the biggest web site that most non-parent adults haven't heard of. (According to their press kit they are the fourth most trafficked site among Americans, after only Yahoo, eBay and MSN, and have by far the longest time spent on the site per user.)

(Disclosure: plugging a conference that two of us are speaking at.)

November 13th, 14th and 15th in New York City: a conference called State of Play: on Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds. It's sponsored by the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and has a truly incredible lineup of people — too many to mention them all by name, but Swami Shirky will be presenting along with many of my favorite designers and the theorists and academics doing the most interesting work in the space, including the whole cast of the recently launched Terra Nova site.

I'll be distributing a discussion paper and doing a presentation called Beyond the Body: Modeling Complex Group Interactions in an MMP Game and I'm particularly looking forward to Raph Koster's keynote. [Clay, if your title is announced, stick it here].

Registration cost is $150 for catering and includes "and covers all meals and entertainment listed on the conference program (Thursday dinner through Saturday lunch)".

Two years ago I was consulting for the CBC (Canada's national broadcaster) doing user research as part of an effort to revamp their online services for kids. That meant spending a lot of time at kids' (9-12 year olds) houses and in classrooms, watching them use their computers in context, seeing who they used the computer with, who drove, which games they played, which sites they visited, which applications they knew how to use.

And when you get past the veneer of "I want to have fun!" or "I like to play games!", what kids really want to use the internet for is ... talking to other kids. And, of course, that's the one thing that is not allowed.

The Google-is-going-to-buy-Friendster rumour is now out in "print" and publicly linkable (although this doesn't seem like a permanent URL — will correct and remove this comment when possible). I've been busting, keeping this to myself for the last week.

So, what does this mean? Why would Google buy Friendster? To get the ball rolling, a few entirely speculative, silly and half-baked answers:

• [Consumer internet]/[social network] stuff is hot now and Google has cash
• Google is dumber than we thought
• Google is smarter than we thought, and we are too dumb to understand Friendster
• Hmm ... PageRank + social networks = ? [More annoying email soliciting friendships. -Ed.]
• People are the new content
• Friendster really can be the Match.com killer
• Google wants lifelong relationships with their users (and their users' relationships)
• Blogger + Friendster = ??
• Blogger + Friendster + Google = ???!

Uber-nerd (in the best possible way) Andy Baio has a launched a new site called Upcoming.org, a collaborative event calendar. Metafilter creator (and social software hater) Matt Haughey has the scoop:

Upcoming ties together a few of the strings that the past couple years of software tinkering has made for us. It's got parts of Craigslist, MetaFilter, Friendster, and weblogs rolled into it. You create an account and post events you're going to, and friends and others in your metro area can find out about them via the site or RSS. Every event is like a blog post that allows comments from others.

...

Andy's told me that more RSS feeds, FOAF, iCal support, and Trackback implementations are on the way.

Just like how Movable Type built upon the first generation work of earlier blogging engines, I think upcoming is the first of a new breed of social software apps that fills a need, and samples the best ideas from a previous generation of applications. I think it's baby steps in the right direction and I can't wait to see what applications look like in 2-3 years when a site like upcoming.org is more the norm.

Hello Many readers. This evening's dispatch finds your intrepid guest blogger freshly home after a slog across the front lines of the social software revolution (except 'home' is temporarily some random high speed-enabled hotel in Palo Alto). The good fight was today being fought at the Bishop Auditorium at Stanford's Graduate School of Business where various luminaries convened for a presentation and panel on the topic "Social Networking: Is There a Business Model?".

My amazingly sporadic and piecemeal report follows ...