On Friday January 4, 2007, Monster.com, the announced the purchase of Affinity Labs which operates industry specific websites providing online communities for social and professional networking, job searching, information and resources for $61 million. Some of the sites in Affinite Labs portfolio include PoliceLink.com, NursingLink.com,  FireLink.com, and TechCommunity.com.

Online sports network Active Athlete announced it has acquired GolfBuzz, Inc., a developers of publishing tools and technologies dedicated to the golf community. Financial terms were not disclosed. GolfBuzz offers products and services including widgets and classifieds which Active Athlete plans to also integrate into it’s network of 180 sites. Active Athlete claims that it number of unique visitors increased 20-fold to 18 million since January 2007.

SheKnows, a division of AtomicOnline, acquired LovingYou.com, a marriage and relationships advice site.  LovingYou receives around 500,000 uniques per month with 12 million page views and has been online for over 10 year.  No price was disclosed.

Microsoft Corp. has acquired UK based European mapping and location website Multimap.com in an effort to expand it’s location-based search engine and advertising web properties and to better compete with Google. Multimap.com which was started in 1996, receives more than 10 million users each month and has 120 employees. It expects $24 million in revenues in 2007, but only made around $1.6 million in pre-tax profit in 2006. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Penthouse acquired adult-oriented social network operator Various Inc., which owns and operates more than 25 sites like AdultFriendFinder.com, alt.com,  Italianfriendfinder.com, gradfinder.com and even faith-based sites like bigchurch.com, for $500 million. Various has a membership base of more than 260 million users and about 1.2 million paid subscribers and generates an estimated $340 million in revenue. Penthouse had previously acquired  Danni.com in March 2007.

San Francisco based social shopping website StyleDiary.net has been acquired by StyleHive.com. StyleDiary.net which allows users to submit, tag and vote on fashion items raised $2.62 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners last year. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.