With Microsoft buying a slice of Facebook, News Corporation owning MySpace (and rumoured to be bidding for LinkedIn) and Google announcing OpenSocial and releasing API's for building applications across Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, LinkedIn, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com and XING - what's going on?

Microsoft, Google and News Corporation have realised that as audiences, content, desktop, devices and distribution fragments and atomises - the current natural law that entry into the Internet is via "search" is being displaced - and if audiences choose alternative ways to use the Internet for work and play it threatens their advertising revenue streams.

This represents a tremendous opportunity for B2B publishers who serve niche professional audiences - and one only has to look at Murdoch buying Dow Jones to see a rationale whereby LinkedIn is integrated as a business social network into the Dow Jones portfolio with Factiva being used for "professional" web search - the same model could be applied for B2B publishers - develop a vertical search capability and then create a vertical search toolbar / widget that can be easily distributed into all the social networks - the widget could also contain additional tabs that include additional content like editorially vetted RSS feeds, workflow tools etc.