Weaving a Tighter Web 2.0

Called Spore, the new game from Will Wright lets players create exotic virtual species from scratch. If you have friends who are also playing the game, you can keep up with their virtual creations through "Sporecasts," which will automatically feed those creations into your virtual universe. (AP)

The music site is even leveraging the information it gleans from your social networks to better serve up the content users are seeking. If you've synced your Facebook account with your eMusic account, the next time you search for an artist or band, the eMusic search engine will pop up results that also take into account what your friends have been listening to lately, in an attempt to deliver more relevant results.

Spore producer Caryl Shaw said that even though the upcoming game, set for release next month, has been in development since before the advent of Flickr and Facebook and YouTube, such sites have had an impact on the game's final incarnation.

Originally, the game's design team thought they would personally pick out the best content that players designed and download them into the universes of Spore players. But the advent of social networking tools happened to complement ideas of the game's design team for how Spore would work. "We had kind of a light-bulb moment," she said.

Now, she said the game is a little like Facebook in that it will allow players to keep up with friends without having to talk to them that much. "I look at Spore as this game that's sort of like Facebook, sort of like Flickr," said Shaw during a recent trip to Washington to show off the game.

Other executives, however, sometimes shrug off the buzzwords.

"This is Shutterfly's social networking play," agreed Jeffrey Housenbold, Shutterfly's chief executive, of his company's new Share 2.0 product.

But, then again, Web sites like his have always strived to enhance the social or family connection among users, he said, whatever the jargon of the day is. "Social networking is just this era's new way of saying community," he said.