Unable to match the pure social power of MySpace or Facebook — no matter how many Virtual Laguna Beaches it launches — Viacom is taking the next leap in the networking frontier. Instead of hosting, it's getting all Matrixy and becoming the network. Its Flux platform is sort of like Microsoft's PassPort or Google Checkout — a universal profile and set of user features that will appear across Viacom's sites and any interested third parties. A smarter move considering we're all sick of remembering multiple logins, but when will we finally reach social network saturation?

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