A few weeks ago, I dropped in on Hans Peter Brøndmo, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, to talk about Plum, one of the many different kinds of social networks that are not Facebook.

Brøndmo is CEO and founder of Plum, which was founded several years ago, and is trying to make a business in the places big social networks ignore.

Sites like Plum are what many like to call microsocial networking, used by people or Web sites who want less the overwhelming experience that the large social networks have become and more an ability to create with a smaller group.

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Last week, StumbleUpon announced it was buying itself out of its much-vaunted previous corporate buyout, by being born again as an “investor-baked start-up.”

The Canadian-born social-bookmarking company, which was launched earlier, came to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy venture investors and soon became a traffic-generating hit.

Then StumbleUpon was bought by eBay two years ago for $75 million in one of Web 2.0’s high points.

End of a fairy tale? Um, nope.

Here’s CEO and co-founder Garrett Camp, talking to BoomTown in a video interview about it all.

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In a move to dramatically increase its traffic and give it more tools to offer publishers, Clearspring Technologies said it will acquire AddThis, the top bookmarking and content-sharing tool on the Web.

As with many social-networking start-ups, whether this disparate traffic can be easily translated into a revenue-generating business remains to be seen.

The McLean, Va.-based Clearspring–one of several widget networks seeking to connect publishers and advertisers with social tools by helping them embed small pieces of content across Web and monetize that content–would not disclose the price it paid for the Princeton, N.J.-based AddThis.

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