These are my links for December 7th through December 8th:

• What's going on here then? | StreetWire (beta) – Welcome to StreetWire (beta) where you can find out what’s going on near you. From gigs and blog posts, to planning applications and missing kittens.
• Facebook Connect vs. OpenID: Who Will Emerge Victorious? – ReadWriteWeb – Facebook Connect, the system the company has long discussed as "Facebook on sites all around the web," enters general availability today and we've got one big question – should website owners use Facebook or OpenID to authenticate and learn about their users? Will Facebook become a dominant identifier online? Will the OpenID community lose out to the company's proprietary system or will this challenge breathe new life into the movement for open source, standards based, federated user identity?
• Ten leading platforms for creating online communities | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com – Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you’re on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner.
• Twitter Groups – Who said that Twitter needs to have Groups?
  Now you can create your own Group tag and invite your friends on Twitter to join you. Expand your Twitter experience by sharing links and allowing other to follow you and join your group.

  Create a new Group or Join an existing group. Follow people with the same interests as you. Find new people to follow. Let people follow you. Share your favorite website links.

• Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope – research results – Social Computing Lab, HP Labs – Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.