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According to Inside Facebook, the blue giant may be working on a native Twitter application as evidenced by engineer Blake Ross' tweet from an application named "Penguin FB" on Facebook's development servers. Asks Inside Facebook's writer Justin Smith, "Is Facebook about to become the largest source of tweets?" The company did not comment on the "Penguin FB" project and Ross has since deleted the "Penguin FB" test tweet. For now, the public is left in the dark as to what all this means.

It seems we're always going back and forth on the subject of Facebook's usefulness at work. Some would argue that Facebook is no longer just a time-wasting application for poking people and throwing sheep - it's a critical part of their daily communications with co-workers, colleagues, and others within their industry. In fact, earlier this month, we reported on a study that showed the growing acceptance of social networking applications in the workplace. The study noted that nearly half of I.T. professionals now saw Facebook as one of the apps that had business value.

Yet today, there's new information being released that seems to say something different about the state of social networking applications in the workplace. According to Nucleus Research, Facebook causes a 1.5% decrease in employee productivity.

I admit it: I have Facebook friends I've never met, people I'd be hard-pressed to pick out of a police lineup. I've even created a special group for them, just like I did for the people who I can't believe have had the nerve to friend me after that thing they said to me in Grade 9 math class.

Maybe a lot of the dynamic of networks like Facebook is all about reliving our high school years... only this time, thanks to the long tail, there's no shortage of people who want to go to the virtual prom with us. It's tempting to say yes; we all get a chance to be captain of the football team, head cheerleader, president of the debating society (what? that is too just like the others).

According to a new report from eMarketer, paid advertising on social networks in the US will drop 3% in 2009. In 2008, advertisers spent $1.175 billion on ads on social networks, but eMarketer predicts that this number will fall to $1.14 billion this year. The main culprit here is MySpace. EMarketer expects that ad spending on the social network will fall 15% in 2009. At the same time, it expects to see a 9% growth in ad spending on Facebook, and most other social networks are also doing just fine. EMarketer expects that this drop will be short-lived, however, and predicts a 13.2% increase in ad spending in 2010.

Read Part 1 of this post here.

In a recent study by Anderson Analytics, the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn were revealed. The ultimate goal was to provide marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today. Here we'll delve into the details about the specific networks studied.

A new study by Anderson Analytics looks into the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn with a goal of providing marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today.

Some of the study's findings echo things we've already heard. For example, Facebook users tend to be old, white, and rich. MySpace users are young...and fleeing. Other info is new: Twitterers are more likely to have a part-time job, LinkedIn users like to exercise and own more gadgets.

You can't swing a stick on the Web these days without hitting a photo or media sharing service. Some of the most popular ones like Flickr and Photobucket have become an indispensable part of our online lives. Among the most recent services to enter the game is Expono, a photo sharing, organizing and protecting service with added features like GPS tagging and the ability to connect with social media services Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed. Expono has everything you would expect to find on a media sharing site like online backup, easy sharing, albums and tagging, but adds a whole bunch more features that you might not expect all in one place. It is certainly worth taking a look at.

In September of 2008, Expono went live with its site and made the bold choice to go with 100% cloud computing. Other sites like SmugMug have done this with great success and it feels like a growing trend. The lower cost and ease of scaling made cloud computing a sensible choice for Expono and the company set about building its incredible array of features. Those features, combined with the company's talented and ambitious team based in Oslo, Norway, make Expono a potential contender in an increasingly crowded media sharing marketplace.

Rupert Murdoch, the 78-year-old CEO and chairman of News Corp., just gave a revealing interview to The Street's Dan Freed. In this interview, Murdoch argues that the latest head-count reduction at MySpace was necessary because the number of employees at the company had grown out of control. In addition, he also told Freed that he wants the site to be very different from Facebook, which, in his eyes, is nothing more than a directory, while MySpace is a place "to find common interests, share music, that sort of thing."

Great bruising battles between powerful antagonists is good for media. It "sells papers," as we used to say, or "generates clicks", as we now say. When you mix in a love triangle and jilted lovers, well, the audience just goes wild. And Wired did a great job in its piece on Facebook, Google, and Microsoft: riveting stuff. But the thought that kept coming back to me is that Facebook's bravado, its "grand vision" talk, is what you would expect from a concept-level startup. Surely by now, about 6 years into its venture, Facebook should show some substance? It is time to deliver some real financial results. The concept-level talk is great for attracting capital and talent. Facebook has done that brilliantly. But the point of attracting capital and talent is to be able to generate financial results.

Looking for a good conspiracy theory today? Well here's one: Chris Almond, the administrator of a Facebook group called the Rogue Facebook Apps Early Warning Group just got kicked off the social network. Why did this happen? Did Facebook not like how he was posting details about Facebook malware, hacks, and attacks? Attacks like this recent one that exposed private Facebook profile information just by clicking on a link?

Or was Facebook simply following through on a TOS violation because Chris had accidentally sent out duplicate messages to group members, thereby getting flagged as a spammer and subsequently booted from the network?