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.

Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) has been decent recently about integrating tools outside its own realm into its newer products. Take, for example, Outlook. The most widely-used corporate email client has lost ground in recent years to web-based email alternatives that allow email usage without a locally-installed application.

From looking at the newer Outlook 2010 (which has not been released yet), Microsoft is trying something new: making Outlook a central communication hugs that not only handles corporate email, but integrates such social networking services as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

As Facebook passes the 400 million user threshold, a flight from social media is beginning to take shape. A growing number of users are reconsidering the sharing (and oversharing) of life details. Reasons vary -- from seeing their networks swell from just close friends to distant connections and strangers to worries over where their personal information can wind up. More than anything else, they say they want to return to "real life."

Depending on how this shakes out, the trend could force social media company employees to get back to real life as well. If the backlash gains momentum, it could cost these companies traffic, which translates to a revenue hit and, in the extreme, viability. Yet, if the likes of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook can weather the storm, they will come out the other side stronger than they are now.

If Mark Zuckerberg knew then what he knows now ... Facebook would be more like MySpace, which is now owned by News Corp. (NWS). And, he's willing to admit this in public.

In a six-minute on-stage interview with TechCrunch, Zuckerberg went on at length about the social media platform's privacy settings, which have been the subject of unending debate. He says that he'd make more data public by default if he could start Facebook again. Though Zuckerberg cites Internet trends that indicate a reduced concern with privacy, the real reasons are more likely financial.

Does anyone remember Friendster? For about ten minutes seven years ago, it was the hottest thing in social networking. The site that effectively kicked off the social media movement didn't stay in vogue long, however, eventually riding a wave of user referrals to Asia. Meanwhile, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter came along, taking over the sector -- and the hype that comes with it.

Well, Friendster is worth something to somebody, it seems. The company is due to be sold at the end of the month for $100 million. The social networking service is tops in Asia, which is where more than half of its 100 million-strong user base can be found.

Who needs venture capital money when you have litigation? Facebook was awarded $711 million in damages Thursday in an anti-spam case against Sanford Wallace, an internet marketer. The popular social networking platform went after Wallace for tapping its users' accounts without their permission and sending fake posts and messages.

Wallace has quite a reputation for spamming, having gained the nicknames "Spam King" and "Spamford" back in the 1990s, when he was good for up to 30 million spam e-mails a day.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) makes it easier to search for websites, e-mail messages, passages from books and videos. Where you haven't heard much about Google's search capabilities -- or Google in general -- is the music business.

But, that's about to change. On Wednesday, the search giant announced that it was partnering with music services such as Pandora, Lala, News Corp's (NASDAQ: NWS) MySpace, and Rhapsody by RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) to help users find, listen to and ultimately buy music on the web.

Doug McIntyre wrote this morning that News Corp (NYSE: NWS)'s MySpace.com will be challenging Facebook in the social networking space with its new open-source platform. This means anyone and everyone with programming and/or web knowledge will be able to wrap their hands around MySpace's hundred-million plus registered users and create applications and useful features that users of the social networking site will love and use -- and will keep them coming back more often for longer periods (known as "stickiness" in the web universe).

Although Rupert Murdoch is now touting the growth in MySpace since News Corp bought the web property two years ago, I still see no solid figures on how the property is being monetized and how profit growth is happening. Yes, Murdoch says that social networking has become "explosive" in the near past. That is very true, and it's something I noted in a post on Facebook yesterday.

MySpace and Facebook may be garnering a huge slice of eyeballs these days, but are they monetizing that traffic? What are page views and visitor counts if little to no 'valuable' revenue is being generated? Some would say all revenue is valuable, but I disagree. If irrelevant ads show up on web pages, they count as being viewed (an "impression"). Does the viewer do anything with this "impression?" Is this growth being measured?

All that click counting is well and good. And growing page views are an advertisers delight. But how much time are people really spending looking at various web sites?

Jay Meattle at Compete.com has a great breakdown of where people spent most of their time on the web in December 2006. Some of the results are surprising.

Twenty domains account for fully 39% of time spent online. MySpace.com (a division of the News Corporation, NYSE:NWS ) was the big winner, taking a lion's share of 11.9% viewing time (27,999,906,051 minutes) followed by Yahoo! Inc.(NASDAQ:YHOO) with 19,898,123,587 minutes. According to these figures, 11.9% of ALL TIME online was spent at MySpace.com!

The big surprise is Google, Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). It came in only fifth with 2.1% (4,959,635,138 minutes). The figures for YouTube (#12 with 1,327,25, 263 minutes) were separate, but even if you add them together they don't get close to Yahoo.

Also, some sad(to me) appearances in the top 20: Neopets.com at #18, accounting for 0.3% of viewing time with 593,851,415 minutes, and adultfriendfinder .com at #19 for 0.2% of viewing time with 575,584,893 minutes.

Maybe Christmas is a lonelier time for some.

Will Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (NYSE:NWS) rid itself of the famous social gathering website MySpace.com in order to get a big return on its investment? That rumor is swirling about these days amid reports of a possible shift in where finicky and trend-obsessed teens go online. Presumably, they are heading for the "next big thing" -- whatever that is.

Sure, Murdoch picked up MySpace.com for $580 million just this past summer in a move that was seen as brilliant because the price was abnormally low. These days, companies spend billions on completely unproven business models and trendy websites that have billions of page hits but which aren't producing the cash flow or the potential to become a long-term financial and marketing entity. Call it "dot-com 2.0." I sure do.

The scuttlebutt now is that Murdoch my be looking for a buyer for MySpace. In recent comments, he said that he thought News Corp. could garner about $6 billion for the web property. Others have said that a price tag of $10 billion to $20 billion is even feasible. Hogwash -- but I would like some of what these people are smoking. MySpace is *not* a $6 billion business by any measure whatsoever, unless the sheer number of pageviews in some analyst's marketing statistical package translates into pure cash play. It doesn't. Yet. Maybe never. Murdoch's mention of 200 million users by next year is a great stat -- but there needs to be results. Hard results. As in cold, hard cash.

In what I consider to be a brilliant move by Fox, the television network says that will be airing reruns of popular Fox Network television shows online, at MySpace.com, during the upcoming MLB Baseball playoffs.

The playoffs and resultant World Series end-up preempting several prime-time Fox shows during the October and November timeframes, so instead of forcing customers to watch baseball on their television networks, Fox is giving customers a choice of tuning into reruns of popular Fox shows online.

That, for one, is the a defining example of giving customers choice in the digital age that is integrating television broadcasting with Internet distribution. In fact, the space continues to morph more and more, and the only critical piece missing is an easy, very cheap and popular device for transferring content or even a computer screen's signal into the living room television.

Devices such as the upcoming iTV from Apple will do just that, as already many other gadgets being sold by many companies do. But, so far, the cost is more than it should be (get it down to less than $100). It is also unknown if the interfaces and designs on the current products are as well-designed as Apple's iTV will surely be. If you have one of these devices, comment on it -- I would love to hear how it works.

Will other networks follow Fox's lead and play reruns for a segment of their audience during major sporting events? You know, at least for the wives that have no interest in sports playoffs? Well, that statement comes from the numerous commercials that depict ordinary housewives being bored to tears with sports of all kinds -- a typical marketing stereotype, you know. Seriously though, this move by Fox is really a head-turner. If only more television networks controlled an online empire like Fox does with MySpace.com.

Although YouTube gets plenty pf press these days, video postings and sharing at MySpace.com topped all online video offerings in July, beating Yahoo! Videos, Google Video and the venerable YouTube.com in the number of videos served.

Over 37 million viewers collectively watched over 1.4 billion videos on MySpace pages in July. This is not surprising considering that the audience at MySpace.com is so large -- the web property rivals Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) for the amount of visitor traffic it gets. In other words, the law of averages probably came into play nicely here.

But there is a difference. YouTube has amateur videos and all kinds of clips ripped from copyrighted sources (no matter how much it's policed). MySpace.com probably has the same kind of content, but my guess is that the teenage to upper-20s demographic that inhabits most of MySpace makes the videos that are there fitting to that demographic. That's a total guess but seems rational.

On the other hand, the array of content available at Google Video and YouTube spans generations and ages easily. But the difference here comes to targeted advertising. With News Corporation (ASX: NWS) now owning MySpace, the corporate media behemoth will have a pretty influential voice into the targeted online advertising that MySpace visitors and users view (and hopefully, respond to en masse).

Google Video visitors are also served targeted advertisements, but the visitors must be much more varied than MySpace.com video visitors. What is the difference here? Hmm, not sure there is one -- depends on who is the larger overall base.

In this post, I discussed how Yahoo! was primed to continue being a great home to its millions of customers by being a "sticky" and "relationshippy" partner, as opposed to a destination for information. In fact to this day I still find competitor Google to be more of a destination for information of all kinds, and Yahoo! to be more like a community. Although Google has made great strides to change things with personalized this and personalized that.

So is there a new game in town? You bet there is, and it's News Corp.'s MySpace.com. With Fox Sports being part of the same happy family, MySpace.com is being positioned as a home to millions of fantasy football players all over the U.S. in a challenge to Yahoo! Sports' leadership in this rather unique, nichy, and lucrative "sticky" business. With live scoring and statistics available to users of MySpace's fantasy football offering -- which cost extra at Yahoo! -- here's another example that may force Yahoo! to up the ante in its offering, like Google's Gmail did years ago when Yahoo!'s email offering featured a measly 2MB of storage.

News Corp. execs aren't being lackadaisical or lazy, they are already mingling assets under the Murdoch umbrella in an attempt to grow the fortunes of News Corp. and entrench cross-promotional properties across mediums like television and the Internet. The purchase of MySpace.com gave Murdoch's company a built-in user base of highly-desirable consumers. If it can keep them by not being a totalitarian corporate overlord, which it has not done yet so far, the future will be brighter than it has been in some time -- except for the competition.

Facebook, the website network built for and designed to connect high-school and college students, is treading on interesting ground these days. Back on August 24th the company signed an agreement with Microsoft for the computer software maker to supply and deliver all the advertisements that are displayed on the Facebook website. This is akin to the agreement between MySpace.com and Google recently, whereby Google will perform basically the same function by providing search functionality and related advertising across the MySpace.com website property.

Facebook is now releasing an RSS-lookalike function that will combine user profiles and related information into a "news feed" format that will, if adopted in great strides, probably cause less actual page viewing throughout Facebook's website. It will also send consumers of the Facebook website to a feed page, not a website page, where potentially less page views and advertisements will be seen. Oops -- less advertisements will be seen? That sounds fishy to me. I wonder how Microsoft would respond to this.

Facebook, however, may decide to embed advertising into its "news feeds" for condensing user profile information. This would be the sensible thing to do, although it must proceed carefully to not alienate consumers and users of that new feature. With 9 million registered users and 14.4 million user visits claimed in July, Facebook.com has a meaty section of advertising market targets.

But as always I question the exact measurement of what constitutes "registered users." Did Facebook.com see 14.4 million "unique" visitor pageviews in July, or did the same 1 million users view 14 pages each throughout the month? When ad rates are drawn up data like this is extremely important but usually glossed over. Microsoft is hoping for unique advertising opportunities I would think, not consistent users who at some point may actually ignore ads.

When Rupert Murdoch's News. Corp purchased the incredibly-popular MySpace.com social networking portal, the global media behemoth promised not to distract the founders from what they do best -- provide a great environment for a certain age demographic. They said they would let MySpace continue to be the virtual "mall hangout" for millions.

So far, that has held true, and of course, News Corp. wants to have advertising displayed all over the social website to cash in on those lucrative and captive-audience ad dollars. To that tune, Google signed a rather high-profile deal with MySpace just a few weeks ago worth $900 million to do just that. Off to the races we all go now...

But are there signs of change at MySpace lurking beneath the proverbial covers? Recently, after some worry-filled days and nights, the MySpace laid-back, but intensely-focused, culture was uprooted as its headquarters was moved from Santa Monica to Beverly Hills, where News Corp. was consolidating its Internet properties. Tom Anderson -- co-founder of MySpace -- is now going through regular corporate drills like budget reviews and executive meetings.

MySpace is also about to roll out enhanced photo and video-sharing capabilities that will allow the site to complete with social photo-sharing and tagging communities like Yahoo!'s Flickr and YouTube -- two of the web's most popular sites for sharing photos and videos, respectively. Will MySpace be able to integrate advertising in such a way that it does not overwhelm and scare off its target market of teens and young adults? That remains to be seen. If it can, then Yahoo! and others may need to watch out. The community of the future may not be on Yahoo!'s immensely-popular portal, but on MySpace.