Here are two news stories of note related to social networks during the past few days.

Firstly, rumour has it that Microsoft is cosying up to Facebook and wants to negotiate some small stake in the site for around $400 million.

Secondly, and certainly more exciting from my POV is the story that Google is thinking about providing an API to social graph data from its social networking service orkut, which could potentially be used by any third-party applications or even by other social media sites such as Bebo, Twitter, etc.