The mobile revolution is spawning a variety of business relationships to attract new customers. The latest is the partnership between credit card holder, American Express (AXP) and the social network Foursquare Labs Inc.

Both companies are capitalizing the growing segment of online purchasing. American Express had roughly $100 billion in online transactions last year. Online spending is growing at a 20% rate, compared to15% for overall spending, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

The world of Internet traffic moves at lightning speed. So, too, do the moods and preferences of users. Back in 2007, News Corp's (NWS) MySpace was No. 1. Google.com (GOOG) took the No. 1 spot in 2008 and 2009. In 2009, Facebook has taken the No. 1 spot, with 8.9% of U.S. visits, edging Google.com, which had 7.2% of visits, Reuters reported, citing online measurement service Experian Hitwise.

Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg and a few classmates in 2004. Facebook users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact details and other information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also join interest groups and "like pages."

When they say tech is hot, it's hot. Aol (AOL) bought About.me just four days after it began its public debut. The terms were undisclosed.

About.me allows users to create a profile from all of their social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedln -- like an online business card. It has a built in dashboard to track social networking interactions and influence.

Google (GOOG) has gone ga-ga over social-networking acquisitions, with deals for Slide, Like.com, Metaweb and Jambool. Desperately trying to go beyond its advertising business, the company sees big-time growth opportunities in the sector. However, Google is late to the game -- and its home-grown efforts have been lackluster, such as Buzz, Google Wave and Orkut.

Well, the latest social networking deal for Google is a tiny startup, Angstro. Actually, it's not a social network. Instead, the company has a system to pull information from various sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on. With this, Angstro can do things like improve Caller ID, as well as create a real-time social address book.

While an M&A strategy has its risks, the payoffs can be significant. No doubt, this approach has been critical for the success of Oracle (ORCL). Also, M&A turned Cisco (CSCO) into a tech giant.

Well, it looks like Google (GOOG) wants this magic as well. And one of the big targets is social networking, which means taking on Facebook.

For example, Google recently purchased Jambool, which operates a virtual currency for online gaming. The company's service is known as Social Gold.

Have sword, will travel.

The number of ninjas on LinkedIn is on the rise. According to the latest post on the company's blog, new job titles are popping up on the popular business social networking site. From 2002 to 2007, the percentage of job titles including the word "ninja" spiked, according to LinkedIn. The company is quick to explain that these people aren't the assassins of old. "They are more likely to throw Java exceptions rather than steel stars," writes Monica Rogati.

Twitter has struggled to bring more users onto its website. Approximately 70% of end-user interaction with the microblogging service takes place away from Twitter.com. As the company moves toward its search-based ad model, expected to be released later this quarter, website traffic is becoming increasingly important. Yet, it's this gap between use and on-site action that might protect the company going forward ... at least if Facebook can be used as an indicator.

With Facebook Connect, members of the social networking site can interact with their profiles "remotely." If you want to share this blog post on Facebook, for example, you can do it without opening a new browser, plucking www.facebook.com on the keyboard and pasting the URL into the status field. This connection, even though it costs Facebook a pageview or two, reinforces the user's relationship with the site, increasing the likelihood that he or she will remain active overall. It also provides fodder for other members, fueling more clicks, comments and likes ... and ultimately cash in the Facebook till.

I already had trouble wrapping my head around a $3 billion valuation from Zynga back in February. But the latest big number is just inconceivable. SecondShares, which is run by former private equity analysts to determine how much private equity companies would be worth if they went public, pegs the value of this social games company at $5 billion, approximately 75% above its current trading in illiquid secondary markets for private companies.

Several factors are used to determine a private company's valuation, including prices for employee stock options. Of course, private company valuation can be squishy under any circumstances, but fast-moving social media companies with penchant for secrecy make the process more difficult.

Facebook is putting the brakes on early employee stock sales. The social media company implemented a new policy last Friday, claiming that the prohibition on trading the company's pre-IPO shares is intended to keep employees out of legal trouble, reports Inside Facebook.

This may come as an unfortunate development to employees eager to get a taste of publicly traded riches in advances, as Facebook's shares have been shooting higher in the secondary markets where they can be traded.

There may soon be a chilling breeze blowing through the halls of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. The reason for this coming chill is a just released application intended for monitoring employee communications on social networks. The new application, called Social Sentry, is being fielded by information technology powerhouse, Teneros, which has raised $92.5 million in venture capital over five rounds of funding.

Social Sentry differs from it's counterparts in that when employees leave their employer's computer network, this new communications monitoring software can follow those employees home, or to the library, or to an Internet cafe, or just about anywhere. Under the auspices of protecting proprietary business information, Social Sentry steps across the Fourth Amendment and goes where even law enforcement treads lightly.

The fact that eBay (EBAY) is PayPal's largest merchant isn't exactly surprising. The auction market is huge, and it's also the online payment company's parent. Yet, the word out of the 2010 Media Summit in New York last week is that Zynga, the social media games company, is the second largest merchant for the payment environment. Social games are growing rapidly, bolstered in large part by the rise of Facebook, which now boasts around 400 million users.

As social media companies realize they need to move to the next level -- from adoption to revenue -- the virtual goods market has emerged as a substantial revenue stream, and Zynga's environment appears to have been designed to capitalize on it. According to an estimate by Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney, PayPal took care o$500 million in virtual goods payments last year.

Do you remember when MySpace was all the rage? Of course you do. Then came Facebook; then came Twitter. Something else will come along, too. Unfortunately, though, News Corp. (NWS) committed itself to MySpace by buying it back in 2005. What a mistake that was.

I'm sure everyone knows about the growth problems at the social-networking site. This recent article at Reuters discusses them. Morale at the company appears to be waning. Unique visitors aren't what they used to be. An ad agreement with Google (GOOG) is about to expire; any new transaction on that front may not be as valuable now that MySpace has been relegated to not-as-cool-as-it-used-to-be status.

Nobody's naming names right now, but Social Times reports from SXSW that "a number" of companies are paying Twitter hefty fees for unrestricted access to the "firehose." While some Twitter data is accessible free through the company's developer program, the full data set is only available to those willing to write a check – and, it turns out, a substantial one.

Back in October, Twitter inked high-profile data-licensing deals with Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), which brought in $25 million and put the social media service on the revenue map. Since then, it has brought more clients into the fold through its data-licensing program, including Kosmix and Scoopler, by opening up what it calls the "firehose"; i.e., unfettered access to the Twitter data stream.

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.

Where there are plenty of women, you're bound to find more and more men. Though the gain was small, the number of men on Facebook grew faster than women in February 2010, making the social networking site look a lot like every hot club in Manhattan -- men chasing women.

Facebook picked up an additional 5 million users in the United States last month, reaching 113 million. Since the middle of last year, the social media site has gained users every month. Though every demographic is showing increases, men are leading the charge. In January, women owned 56.07% of Facebook use, a share of activity that fell to 55.6% in February. Among users age 18 to 44, new male users outpaced females by approximately 2:1.