When Facebook announced its new location-based capabilities after Twitter has already enabled it, the future looked pretty grim for Foursquare. Though wildly popular with the nerd crowd (of which I'm a member ... the nerd world, not Foursquare), could a year-old location-based game go head-to-head with the 400 million-user-strong behemoth of the social media industry? In a strange twist, Facebook is actually breathing life into the killer app many expected it to kill.

Thirty-three percent of Foursquare's traffic comes from Facebook, according to data from Hitwise (EXPN), followed by Google (GOOG) at 22% and Twitter at 8%. The remaining one third of traffic, from everyone else, is fed in part by partnership with major brands such as the New York Times (NYT), Bravo and Zagat.

The December 2009 data from comScore (SCOR) were released Tuesday, and the results for the social media sector are nothing short of staggering. Fifty-four percent (112 million) of the 205 million-strong U.S. internet-user population are on Facebook, with 27% (57 million) still using News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace. But according to data from both comScore and Experian Hitwise (EXPN), the most active users were on Tagged, MyYearbook and Orkut. And Facebook users were more active than those on MySpace.

There's no doubt that plenty is happening in the social media space, but there are some facts that just might surprise you, either because of the speed of change or the discovery of players that may not have occurred to you.

How are readers finding the news? Well, increasingly, the answer is Facebook. The social networking site, which boasts well over 350 million registered users, is now the fourth largest referral source of traffic to online news destinations. Almost a year ago, only 0.5% of traffic to news and media sites came from Facebook. Today, that level is 3.5%, according to data from Web analytics firm Experian Hitwise.

Only Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO) and MSN (MSFT) send more traffic to news sites. Google News, a subset of the search engine giant, failed to keep pace with Facebook, despite the fact that it exists specifically to send Internet users to media outlets. Only 1.39% of referrals came from this source.

Facebook was busy on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, according to Hitwise, but people weren't playing online games. It seems they were more focused on staying in touch and spreading the usual holiday cheer than tending to their farms, cafes and organized crime battles.

Over the holidays, Facebook was the top Website visited in the U.S., Hitwise reported via its Twitter account. The Web metrics company tweeted the bold statement: "Facebook was the most visited site in the US on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 1st time the site has been the #1 visited US site ever."

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) continued its torrid command of the internet search market in February, powering 72% of all those searches. As always, the next three competitors were way behind: Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) has 17% of the market, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) had 6% and Ask.com had 4%.

It's always interesting to see what online audience and traffic measurements have to say about overal web use; traffic, number of users, website loyalty, etc. Now that Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) AOL is acquiring the UK-based social networking site Bebo.com for some $850 million, the site measurement companies are showing their own data. Notice that every one generates a different result.

When you look below, you'll see that all web measurement tools and methods generate different results.

Those of you who have been interested in blogs for several years are probably well aware of the company Technorati. This website made a splash by becoming the first market-share dominator in the entire Web 2.0 space, especially in the blog search engine space. But times have changed and Technorati is struggling to hold on.

The situation in Technorati is quickly shifting to more difficult, seemingly by the day. As TheDeal.com reported on Friday, the founding CEO of the company recently stepped down. In addition, the company has been forced to recently slash eight jobs to adjust the company's expense structure. Perhaps the most startling of it all -- Technorati is quickly losing its dominant market share position.

According to research firm Hitwise, Technorati's number one market share position is now just secured by 1%. The company currently stands at 34% of the blog search market, while Google's blog search product is a strong and growing 33%.

As you can see from the chart below (courtesy of Alexa.com), Technorati's page views figures are well off of their peak. Understandably, this traffic decline has been a huge catalyst to a weakening position in the blog search market, as well as financial difficulties, because for most internet companies, traffic is everything.

Several sources have confirmed that Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is in the closing stages of buying RSS management company FeedBurner. The start-up's traffic has increased over 200% in the past year, according to Hitwise. The company describes its business as Web-based tools to help bloggers, podcasters, and commercial publishers promote, deliver, and profit from their content on the Web.

Websites and blogs use FeedBurner to track RSS feeds and traffic to their sites. Google will pay about $100 million for the company.

The RSS feed business is one that has yet to be monetized, but FeedBurner does have a nascent advertising program. With the use of Google's Adsense program, this revenue could almost certainly be pushed up sharply.

Because FeedBurner is an important source of traffic and data for blogs, it also fits well into the Google Blogger platform, which is used to create millions of blogs. Many of these blogs use Adsense to get their revenue. With Feedburner, Google will have "one-stop shopping" that will offer RSS feeds, audience data, and advertising.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) could have used FeedBurner to enhance their relationship with the blog and RSS communities, but that's another story.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Hitwise was good enough to do a survey of traffic to the major e-mail sites. While the traffic to Google's Gmail (NASDAQ: GOOG) seems to be growing faster than it is to Yahoo! Mail (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft's Hotmail (NASDAQ: MSFT), the lead of the two older products may be insurmountable.

Champions of Google's ability to dominate most markets that it enters will likely grab on to the 17% increase in traffic from February to April 2007. But, Gmail only opened access to all interested users in February. Before that, users had to be invited by other users. Also, as the stat people like to say, the big increase in traffic was from a small base.

Visits to Yahoo! Mail are still thirteen times greater than Gmail visits. Although Gmail users tend to be younger, their income is not much different from users of the other two services.

Hitwise points out that Gmail users are more likely to use Facebook, but why anyone would care about that seems beyond easy analysis.

The survey shows one thing, and one thing only. Gmail is well behind its two major competitors.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Experian has moved aggressively into the net space over the past few years. Some of its acquisitions include PriceGrabber and LowerMyBills.com.

Now the company is shelling out $240 million for Hitwise, which provides measurement services for Internet sites. Hitwise has been around for about ten years and has roughly 1,200 clients (the count increased by 40% in the past two years). Examples include eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and MTV.

Over the past year, Hitwise's revenues surged 50% to $40 million. And by now being part of a larger organization, the company should pick up even more customers.

The deal should also provide a valuation benchmark for comScore, which recently filed to go public. Last year, the firm posted $66.3 million in revenues and $10.9 million in cash flow from operations. It's customers include Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ), and Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO).

You can check out the IPO filing at the SEC website.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace social network site will start to aggregate news and allow its 160 million users to rank stories.

As the content is ranked, it will be pushed down several "channels" like sports and entertainment. Advertisers can then wed their campaigns to the kind of content that they want to target. According to The Financial Times (subscription required): "The response from advertisers so far has been fantastic," said Brian Norgard, co-founder or Newroo, a news aggregation service that was acquired by News Corp last year and integrated with MySpace. "Every advertiser wants to reach a specific customer and we are helping them to do that through these [news] channels."

Well, maybe. Time Warner's Inc. (NYSE: TWX) Netscape and independent company Digg.com have been working this model for quite some time now. A look at their websites would not indicate that there is much targetting going on there beyond Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) text ads.

The problem with news ranking products is that they don't have huge audiences. Digg ranks No. 86 and Netscape ranks No. 539, according to Alexa. Traffic to both sites also is declining, making them less attractive to advertisers who spend most of their money on the top 20 sites.

MySpace obviously has a huge audience, but the advertising success of its news ranking service will depend on how many of its users decide that they want to rank news.

Do people go to a social networking site to do that? Maybe not.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

I had lunch with two attorneys last week (the good news was that they paid -- and it was a sushi restaurant). One of the attorneys said: "Hey, Google has video now. I want to see if I can find some Van Halen music videos."

Yes, my attorney friends are not of the MySpace generation. I said, "Actually, Google has had video for quite some time."

"Oh," he said. "I thought it came out today because the menu on the top of the front page changed."

That was certainly correct. One of the most valuable pieces of Internet real estate had an adjustment last week. The links to Froogle and Groups are now gone. In its place is "Video New!"

Basically, this is a declaration of war against YouTube, an upstart that now dominates online video. Hitwise, which measures and analyzes Web traffic, looked at the impact of the menu change. Of course, Google Video saw a doubling of traffic.

As I noted in a recent piece for BloggingStocks.com, Google is leveraging its huge distribution -- such as AdSense -- to take on YouTube, as seen with its recent deal with MTV. Basically, online video looks like the next hyper-growth market for advertising. And it's something Google must win at all costs.

Here's the Hitwise's chart on the spike in traffic for Google Video:

Tom Taulli is the author of a variety of books, such as The Complete M&A Handbook (Random House) and operates InvestorOffering.com.

In the Web 2.0 world, the formula is pretty simple for pumping-up a valuation to nose-bleed levels. First, you need an inexplicable name for the company.  Next, users need to generate the content, so you can call it a UGC (user generated content) play. Oh, and make sure you use a cool programming technique, such as AJAX.  Finally, if you want a bonus, add video to the mix.

Profits?  Revenues?  Of course not.

Well, the latest rumor is that a new-fangled Web 2.0 play, Bebo, did a "just say no" to a $550 million buyout offer.  Allegedly, the suitor was BT.  Yes, that BT.  The company that makes money selling crusty stuff like telephone services.

This week, Hitwise published its list of top social networking sites. No doubt, the guerilla is MySpace, with nearly 80% marketshare. The #5 on the list is Bebo, with about 1% of the market. 

Assuming $550 million is an accurate offer, investors are valuing social networking in excess of $500 billion. That's several Google's.

Actually, it was not long after that BT said it has no clue about this latest Web 2.0 rumor.  But, in the Web 2.0 world, such niceties are a minor inconvenience. It's now mostly about cashing-out.

With Google solidly commanding internet search globally, it's even more entrenched in the U.S. internet culture. Hitwise is reporting that Google had 59% of all internet searches performed by U.S. customers in May. That's nearing two-thirds of all searches -- a marketshare figure any company would be drooling to have, regardless of industry.

This is an increase from April's Google marketshare figure of 58.6%. While not quite a full percentage point over April, even a gain like this for one month is hugely significant for the Google folks. That's 0.7% of marketshare gain -- in a month. At that rate, Google would easily have 66% of the U.S. internet marketshare -- two-thirds -- by the first quarter of 2007.

What keeps Google in such a commanding spot on the internet search world? It is incredibly easy to use, full of genuine utility, has unobtrusive advertising that customers, gasp, actually respond to. In addition, Google's network for search seems almost uncannily fast -- as in lightning fast. Whatever computer engineering and artificial intelligence is under the hood of Google's search network must be astounding.