In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

MySpace users of Causes were encouraged to post links on their MySpace profiles asking cause supporters to join the cause on Facebook instead. In abandoning MySpace, is Causes abandoning nonprofit groups organizing online with poorer users and people of color? Or are neither MySpace or Causes any big loss for social change organizations?

The Politics of Politics

Amy Sample Ward writes today on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog that she's concerned. "Causes leaving MySpace," she writes, "means that no users there will be able to continue promoting the causes, organizations or sectors that they care about via a process that's already been established, adopted, and networked.

"[The] Causes' About statement says, 'The goal of all this is what we call equal opportunity activism. We're trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world.' The removal of Causes from MySpace where there are active communities of supporters means 'equal opportunity activism' is defined by only certain communities - we know that social networking platforms have very different demographic user groups."

So Sample Ward argues that Causes is being hypocritical by allowing equal access to tools for social change to be defined only by the more economically powerful demographic groups on Facebook.

Causes told users it was pulling out of MySpace because of a lack of activity, but the MySpace App Gallery says there are almost 190,000 active Causes users right now, making it the third most popular app in the politics and causes category.

Housing rights nonprofit exec Justin Massa concurs with Sample Ward and takes the critique a step further: "Causes' justification sounds an awful lot like what financial institutions and the real estate industry used to say about poor and minority neighborhoods. I'm planning a longer post on this subject early next week, but in the meantime wanted to label this for what it is: social network redlining. " [Our link added for clarity.]

On MySpace

Not everyone thinks that MySpace provides a meaningful opportunity to effect social change, though. In an interview four years ago on the topic of nonprofit promotion on MySpace, Pete Cashmore of social network tracking blog Mashable articulated what's now a widely-held belief. He said he believed MySpace was really just filled with young, drunken, hyper-sexualized, attention seekers. "You've been there...it seems crazy for organizations to invest time and resources there," he said, "but it's popular!"

Not everyone sees it that way. The Humane Society, for example, posts daily to MySpace about animal welfare issues for its 65k+ friends.

Causes co-founder Sean Parker poses sitting with crossed legs in his photo on the company profile page; his mission statement begins with the words "According to the historical Buddha..." It's hard to imagine a beneficent religious figure that would ditch MySpace for Facebook, isn't it? Perhaps "the historical Buddha" would choose to pull up stakes from the 11th most popular website in the world if the people were too shallow and go to the hip social network where the money-raising action is.

The Loss of Causes

Perhaps even more cynical are some of the attitudes around Causes itself. This Spring the Washington Post reported that despite big expectations from many nonprofit organizations, posting a Causes app to a Facebook profile and waiting for the money to roll in is a sure path to disappointment.

"Only a tiny fraction of the 179,000 nonprofits that have turned to Causes as an inexpensive and green way to seek donations have brought in even $1,000, according to data available on the Causes developers' site. The application allows Facebook users to list themselves as supporters of a cause on their profile pages. But fewer than 1 percent of those who have joined a cause have actually donated money through that application."

Widely respected nonprofit technology consultant Beth Kanter says that Causes is like a one-night stand. "Where's the opportunity to cultivate and get to know those joiners and move them up the ladder to donation?" she asks, "Where's the relationship building?"

So by pulling out of MySpace, is Causes abandoning some of the people who need it most? Or is MySpace a bad place to do political organizing anyway? Or, is Causes just not a great way to organize and fundraise?

There's a lot of negative feelings around this news, but maybe that's what happens when the struggling nonprofit technology sector puts too much stock in the dalliances of a big-named Silicon Valley baron like Sean Parker.

Kanter brings a twinkle of optimism to the conversation: "This sounds like a great opportunity for other fundraising applications," she says.

According to Experian, nearly 59% of all the social networking visits were visits to Facebook while only 30% were to MySpace - a 55% decrease in market share over the past year in terms of visits for the one-time king of social networks.

Looking at just the year-over-year percent change may give you the impression that Twitter's popularity is through the roof. After all, they posted an increase of over 1000 percentage points. But the truth is, their percentage of visits still remains relatively low. Only 1.84% of visits to social networking sites in September were to Twitter, bringing them in at #4 on the chart.

What? Tagged Beats Twitter?

Facebook and MySpace beat Twitter out for the top two spots, but you may be surprised to see who came in at #3: Tagged. Yes, Tagged, the social networking site that's best known for getting busted in an email invite scam is beating out Twitter.

Although we like to think that spammy marketing tactics don't pay off, it seems that for Tagged they have. Their aggressive methods in the past involved having new registrants add their contact lists to the service which Tagged then used to send out "invites" to everyone in the user's address book. The worst part is that the invites looked as if they came from the individual users when really, most were completely unaware anything had been sent out. Tagged has also been known to send out emails that force users to sign up for accounts in order to see shared photos from other users, even going so far as to guilt-trip recipients into signing up with messages that read: "If you don't click, [the person] may think you said no :(".

As despicable as these tactics are, they've helped Tagged grow and remain profitable. ComScore reported the site had 32 million visitors in April of this year, up from 14 million the prior year. And once there, the visitors are staying engaged, generating over 5 billion pageviews during that month.

Believe it or not, the company is still growing according to the Hitwise data, albeit at a slower rate than it did a couple of years ago when it was adding more users per day than MySpace. In September of 2008, the site received 1.62% of social networking visits and this September, they received 2.38%. Although those numbers are small, they're still larger than Twitter's who came in at 0.15% last year and 1.84% this past month.

Even worse, when calculating the time spent on the social networking sites, Tagged has shown an increase there as well. They're up from 23 minutes in September of 2008 to 25 minutes in September 2009. Meanwhile, Twitter is showing a decrease from 36 minutes to just under 16 minutes year-over-year, a loss of 56%.

Although Hitwise focuses on U.S. traffic only, these findings go against everything we've heard about Twitter and its popularity - in fact, they seem to confirm that there may be more media hype surrounding the microblogging network than there is actual engagement among its users.

It would be interesting to compare the number of users each network has with the visits, but that would be hard to do since Twitter refuses to release those sorts of statistics. Meanwhile, we're left wondering if Hitwise has had some sort of massive system glitch in their system or if we've just seen proof of how Twitter's supposed popularity is just all talk.

That "different space," as it turns out, is music...and it really isn't all that different, especially considering MySpace's roots. If anything, this major overhaul of the social network is an attempt to return the site to becoming the popular entertainment hub it once was.

When MySpace hit the scene back in 2003, local bands - especially indie rock bands - were among the first to create profiles on the social network. Their presence immediately began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the "network effect," MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyone was there.

But at the same time that MySpace was having its heyday, another social networking site was being created. Although still in its infancy in 2004, a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg began writing the code for what would eventually become Facebook, now the world's largest social network.

Over recent months, we've seen the mass exodus from MySpace to the more popular - and more populated - Facebook. Studies have shown that those left actively engaging on MySpace now tend to be younger, lower-income users. Researcher Danah Boyd pointed out, somewhat controversially, that the differences between the two networks, MySpace and Facebook, went further than age and income - they involved your "social class," too.

Tired of being compared to Facebook in this way and certainly tired of hemorrhaging its users, MySpace CEO Van Natta has plans to turn the sinking ship around. After taking over the company six months ago, he's been busy arranging new partnerships for the one-time king of social networks. These partnerships aim to bring the focus back to music, and less on socializing.

New Music Initiatives: iLike, Videos, Artist Dashboards

One of the most notable new initiatives involves MySpace's iLike integration. After being acquired by MySpace in August, many wondered why iLike wasn't becoming a part of the MySpace network. Actually it was, but Van Natta didn't want to disclose that information at the time.

But now, the iLike acquisition is beginning to make sense. Through iLike music video widgets, now popular installations on other social networks like Facebook and Orkut, the videos - and, most importantly, their ads - can be streamed on other sites while the revenue generated returns to MySpace. Even though many of the users watching these videos now may be lost forever to MySpace, they're helping the company regain its footing through their streams.

MySpace's entire music video vault, one of the most popular features on the social network, has also been integrated with iLike. In August, comScore reported 45 million people watched 340 million videos during the course of the month. It only makes sense for MySpace to capitalize on that activity, which is why the company has now launched MySpace Music Videos, an online video archive where users can not only watch videos from their favorite artists, but with a click, purchase the song or ringtone from Amazon or iTunes. Meanwhile, pre-roll, post-roll, and overlay ads help to monetize the content.

In addition, to cater to the musicians, bands, and labels who make MySpace their home, the network has also launched "Artist Dashboards." These online analytical tools track the fans' demographics by age and location, the total number of plays per song, profile views and more. Every artist with a MySpace profile is given free access to these tools.

Is it Enough?

The question that remains, of course, is whether or not MySpace's re-branding efforts will be enough to keep the site from going under. Although MySpace still had a healthy 64 million users in August of this year, that number is 12 million fewer than it did at the same time last year. Meanwhile, Facebook climbed to 300 million worldwide that same month.

Can MySpace entice people to come back to the network through its new music-based initiatives? It's too soon to tell at the moment whether the strategy will work or not, but it's definitely the network's best shot. By capitalizing on what remains the most popular activity on MySpace to date (music and video), the company hopes to become more of a niche site for socializing around music instead of a site for just socializing. The newly launched features are just a part of the company's overall efforts in this direction, too. Still to come are concert ticket and merchandise sales, although no details or launch dates have been given for those features as of yet.

While these efforts may not ever allow MySpace to reclaim its status as the number one social network - that ship seems to have sailed - they could definitely help the network maintain profitability. And at the end of the day, that's all that's really needed. It's not about how many users you have, it's about how much money you can make off of those that you do.

A new report by Openwave provides more evidence of this trend. Their findings show that four of the top ten domains accessed via mobile devices are social networking sites. Facebook and MySpace, of course, featured prominently on that list.

The company's Fall 2009 report highlights mobile Internet use trends in North America and uses data from an unnamed tier-one mobile operator who offers services to both consumers and business. The data sampled represents a five-day period in September of this year.

Among the top ten domains by page impressions are four social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace, Myxer, and Plenty-of-Fish, the last two being a ringtone creation and sharing site and a dating network, respectively. The inclusion of those two under the banner "social networking" is a little iffy, at best. Dating sites could be considered a category of social networking, we suppose, but Myxer seems more like an entertainment destination than a social network.

The other top domains making the list included about.com, accuweather.com, craigslist.org, imdb.com, wap.aol.com, and calltunes.operator.com. While we have no reason to doubt the accuracy of this study, we find it odd that google.com didn't make an appearance. It seems like we google something on our mobile phones on a daily basis - don't you?

Still, despite these questions, it's clear from the findings that social networks are a popular destination for mobile users, even if you only count MySpace and Facebook. Those two sites alone racked up the impressions as both the number one and number three sites visited.

MySpace Beats Facebook? Really?

Oddly, the chart shows that MySpace beat out Facebook, another questionable finding given that once popular site's rapid decline in traffic as of late. Recent numbers from the U.S.-centric analytics firm Compete, for example, showed MySpace traffic dropping from 55.6 million unique visitors in August to 50.2 million in September. Given such a sharp decline, you would expect to see a similar drop in mobile visits as well. 

Meanwhile, Facebook announced that they saw 65 million visits from mobile phones in the month of August, a huge rise from what was only 20 million back in December of 2007. Could they really be beaten out by that much on the mobile web according to this particular carrier? According to Openwave's report, they are.

While this recent report left us wondering, we have no doubt that social network use via mobile phones is trending upward these days. As the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported last month, there has been a one-year increase of 179% in subscribers accessing social networking sites from their mobile devices while those same sites only saw a 10% increase on the PC versions of the sites. And they're just one of many other outlets reporting similar trends. Social networking via the mobile phone is obviously a hot trend these days and one that hasn't peaked yet.

Due to an unfortunate technical glitch, users ended up hearing the audio from the film's trailer over the interview audio. Overall, the audio was a mess, and UStream/MySpaceID integration for commenting was a popup-ridden, timeout-plagued, fail-inducing nightmare. Nevertheless, as a first-time integration of real-time, interactive video on one of the world's largest social networks, we suppose results could have been worse.

Neither the "studio" nor the audio, which was fraught with ear-torturing static, were what one would expect at any other kind of press junket. And the MySpaceID integration, which would allow users to comment on the video chat, was far from perfect. Every text comment required a two-click confirmation, but there didn't seem to be any options to have that content duplicated on a user's profile as a status update or bulletin, which might have helped with attracting more users to the chat. Moreover, a few comments we tried to send timed out or simply didn't post.

MySpace is painfully late to the game in integrating technologies such as Twitter, UStream, and other services that could grant the aging behemoth a second wind in terms of reclaiming former users, especially in the U.S.

In general, the ability to conduct real-time, live video interviews might be a great promotional vehicle for entertainment properties, but this effort seemed far too half-hearted to be a successful implementation of the available technology. MySpace, UStream, and the properties they choose to have participate in these kinds of promotions will have to do a much better job of ensuring a glitch-free experience for a larger group of users if these partnerships are to have any meaning in the company's future.

Those claims are now being further backed up by the Nielsen study, which, in addition to noting the financial discrepancies, also discovered that many social networking users tend to be urbanites, especially those engaged in blogging and tweeting.

The study examined seven of the most popular social networking and blogging sites including Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, ClassmatesOnline, and LinkedIn. Through the Claritas product, Nielsen segments their online panel of 200,000+ participants into demographically and behaviorally distinct groups which include everything from "Young Digerati" to "Heartlanders." After doing so, they found a notable difference between the two top social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

According to the research, the top third of lifestyle segments relative to affluence (aka the "richest" users) are 25% more likely to use Facebook than those in the lower third. The bottom third segments related to affluence (aka the "poorest") are 37% more likely to use MySpace. Also of note, Facebook users are more likely to use LinkedIn, a site for professional business networking, and again, another factor which points towards the differences in demographics between the two social networks.

Besides confirming the income discrepancies between MySpace and Facebook, Nielsen also discovered that those involved in blogging and tweeting tend to live in more urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. The 12 "Urban" lifestyle groups tracked by the company are more likely to use Blogger, WordPress, and Twitter than the 22 "Town and Rural" segments. However, there was no mention of these groups being more affluent, just more urban.

According to new figures from Nielsen, the amount of time spent surfing social networking and blogging sites had tripled since last year, suggesting "a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used," says Jon Gibs, VP of media and agency insights at the company's online division.

Advertisers Taking Notice

While for consumers, hitting up Facebook for a daily dose of socializing is just par for the course nowadays, this change in consumer behavior has had dramatic impact on the online advertising industry. Where before, advertisers were somewhat wary of social media properties, they're now spending more than ever for prominent spots on social networking sites. Even as companies decreased their overall ad expenditures, they increased their spend on top social networks and blogs - up 119% from last year. ($108 million in August 2009 up from $49 million in August 2008). And when broken down by category, the increases are even more dramatic. The entertainment industry, for example, has increased spending by 812% year-over-year on social network sites and the travel industry increased spending by 364%.

When it comes to which sites advertisers choose, there's no doubt that Facebook is currently the king. Ten out of thirteen industries analyzed by Nielsen listed Facebook as advertisers' number one choice when ranked by display ad impressions. The only industries where MySpace still ruled were Entertainment, Financial Services, and Hardware & Electronics.

Those findings seem to mostly support what a study from earlier this year said about MySpace's demographics. Namely, MySpace users are more focused on entertainment than those on other networks and have the lowest average income (hence the need for financial services). However, it's LinkedIn users who are the most interested in gadgets said the study, so the Hardware and Electronic ad spend on MySpace is a bit surprising. We suppose that's simply because the number of MySpace users dwarfs that of LinkedIn. Well that, and the fact that these days "Entertainment" means TVs, game consoles, and other techie gadgets.

For a full look at the dollars spent by category, check out Nielsen's full report.

Just last week, MySpace also announced that its users can now sync their updates with Microsoft's Live profiles. For now, the new two-way sync feature only works with Twitter, though the company notes that it will soon support other networks as well.

AOL also just announced two-way syncing with Twitter when it launched its AIM Lifestream service last week.  Overall, these services aren't very earth-shattering, but it is good to see that MySpace continues to open up and create more links with other services.

It's also becoming increasingly clear that Twitter is now the de facto clearinghouse for status updates. Pretty much every new service that features status updates already pushes updates to Twitter and now most of the older services are also (slowly) coming on board.

As ReadWriteWeb has said in the past, "Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system." With the new Prototypes site, Facebook is not only leveraging its users to create new applications, but also crowdsourcing their reviews to improve the development environment.

To access Prototypes, users can visit the Application Directory and filter by "Prototypes" to find new projects. Some of the current Prototypes for users to review include the Mac Desktops Notifications application, search by "Similar Posts", Photo Tag Search and Recent Comments Filter. The project will begin rolling out gradually beginning this afternoon.

While it's true MySpace's commitment to member customization allowed the community's lowest common denominators to bring down the look of the site, Facebook's aesthetic has also suffered with 3rd party app integration. This is hardly a reason for such a mass migration. And because MySpace and Facebook both offer Blackberry and iPhone applications, it's also unlikely that mobile access played a huge part in MySpace's demise as market leader.

Dougherty's assessment about Facebook Connect is likely the key reason for such dramatic traffic growth given her enclosed time line. As high traffic services like Disqus, Digg and WordPress began using Facebook Connect, members found cross-platform distribution with ease-of-use. Facebook moved from being a College forum site to a full scale lifestyle platform. Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system.

In early June Inside Facebook reported that Americans spent 13.9 billion minutes per year on Facebook and 5 billion minutes on MySpace. When you remember that Facebook doesn't allow for time-consuming html-based profile customizations, you realize the feat they've accomplished. Rather than depending solely on its employees, Facebook's success relies on the fact that it increases its value through its 15,000 Facebook Connect members and more than 50,000 app developers.

Agents are not permitted to friend suspected tax evaders using false information; however, public information is perfectly acceptable. In the past, collections agents were aggressive enough to appear at residences, places of work and schools. If you thought old school debt collectors were tough, think of today's social media wielding bunch as the Terminator 2 version.

While they're unlikely to kill your next-of-kin after questioning them, they can garnish your family's wages and slowly lure you out of hiding. If the group has just caught on to Facebook and MySpace, imagine the power they'll wield once they start using facial recognition software and people search engines like Spock and Pipl. You've been warned. Pay your taxes on time and avoid an audit.

We will live blog the press conference, which should get underway shortly.

10:45am: Still waiting for the call to get going. These events tend to run late, so no surprise there.

10:53: Van Natta: talking about the future strategy of MySpace

MySpace has agreed to buy iLike.

Reason for acquisition: bringing world-class content to MySpace.

"MySpace is a place where people go to express themselves."

Myspace is centralized, while iLike is distributed; both have a shared belief in open content distribution.

10:56: iLike users will not notice iLike acquisition for the time being.

iLike team will remain headquartered in Seattle.

10:57: And that's it for the prepared statement from Owen Van Natta... Taking questions now.

Q&A

10:58: Question: what to expect next in terms of integration? Van Natta: nothing to announce yet - but film could be involved.

10:59: Question: What will this mean for iLike and Facebook? Van Natta: social networks will like the fact that we will make iLike an even richer experience (basically, he politely deflected the question).

12:00: Question: What were the terms of the deal? What will the integration with MySpace music look like? Van Natta: will see how we can integrate the two. For now, the iLike team will continue to operate autonomously. Specifics of the deal remain under wraps.

12:01: Question: Integration? Was delay really delayed by tax questions? Van Natta: No plans yet. On taxes: "it was one of the smoother sailing deals I was involved in."

12:03: Van Natta: the web is going through a movement of socialization - a movement started by MySpace. "Culture is getting defined by the social interaction around content."

12:05: Question: Update on MySpace Music. Van Natta: MySpace music sees 200% growth in use year over year. Expects MySpace Music to remain a great experience for its users.

12:06: Followup: Does iLike's model of giving away free content conflict with the move by News Corp. to charge for content? Van Natta: sometimes people will pay for some content, sometimes content will be ad-supported. Expects MySpace to remain ad-supported.

12:08: Another integration question. What elements of the iLike service might find their way into the MySpace Music service? What will iLike bring to MySpace. Van Natta: we will extend the iLike service beyond music - leverage all the different entertainment categories. Might start adding more concert ticket-related features on MySpace (this is an area where iLike excels).

12:11: Last question: what does this mean for the iLike team? Van Natta: very talented team - we don't want to interrupt the innovation going on there and we want to nurture the talent already at iLike.

12:14: And that's it... thanks for reading. The press release is below and we will surely have more analysis of this deal in the days to come.

The Press Release

MYSPACE TO ACQUIRE iLIKE

LOS ANGELES - August 19, 2009 - MySpace today announced an agreement  to acquire iLike, a leading social music discovery service. The  acquisition brings together two companies who share a common vision  revolving around social discovery and distribution of quality content.  "The iLike acquisition advances our relentless pursuit of innovation  and the need to create new distributed social experiences in music and  beyond," said Owen Van Natta, Chief Executive Officer of MySpace. "We  are deeply committed to bringing world class talent into all areas of  the company and this acquisition demonstrates our focus on this  objective."

Brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi founded iLike in 2006, and in just two  years made it the largest music application across all social networks  with 55 million total users and 1.5 billion monthly impressions. The entire iLike team will stay intact including, CEO Ali Partovi,  President Hadi Partovi and CTO Nat Brown.  All three are seasoned  entrepreneurs who've held executive positions at both start-ups and  Fortune 100 companies.  Prior to iLike, Ali Partovi founded and sold  LinkExchange to Microsoft and Hadi Partovi independently co-founded  and sold TellMe Networks, also to Microsoft. Hadi Partovi also  incubated Start.com (now Live.com).  Brown has a deep and respected  history as an early architect at Microsoft, and he was involved in the  creation the first Xbox, .NET/CLR, and ActiveX/COM/OLE.  "MySpace's strengths have been a long-time source of inspiration for  iLike," said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. "Combining MySpace's  existing platform, reach and resources with iLike's syndication  network and social discovery tools creates the potential for truly  exciting innovation and commerce across any vertical entertainment  category -- our combined assets now span all the major social  networks. I'm enthusiastic about what this combination will mean for  our users, artists, advertisers, and our staff. We are beginning an  exciting new journey together."

iLike users and the artist community should expect the iLike  experience to be unaffected by the acquisition. iLike will remain headquartered in Seattle.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

The MySpace study asked social networking users between the ages of 14 and 21 (aka "Generation Y") questions about their interactions both on social networks and in their real life, too. Some 36% of the respondents said they found it easier to talk about themselves online than in the real world, leading them to share more about themselves using technology. This group also felt that their online friends knew more about them, and so, in a sense, were closer than offline friends because they all knew what was going on in each other's lives.

Outside of the social networking sites, the survey respondents overwhelmingly felt ill-at-ease in social groups. A whopping 72% said they felt "left out" and didn't think they fit into any particular group. More than four-fifths (82%) said they moved between four or more different groups of friends in an effort to find acceptance.

It's not entirely surprising that the younger generation feels this way. The teen years (and young adulthood to some extent) are a time when kids start exploring and experimenting with many different aspects of their personalities as they attempt to solidify who they are and who they will become as adults. What's interesting, though, is how social networking is having an impact on this traditional coming-of-age process. Instead of simply feeling disjointed, confused, and lonely, today's younger generation has an outlet for connecting with their peers which previous generations did not: the internet.

Says Rebekah Horne, MySpace Europe managing director, the study provides insight into how this generation is "using online as a way to explore and settle into their burgeoning identities."

But at what cost?

Will the younger generations remain awkward and shy in the real world as they age, only finding comfort in their interactions that occur online? Or does having an outlet for their feelings simply lessen the blow delivered by the otherwise often harsh process that is growing up?

In many ways, easy access to technology can be seen as both a blessing and a curse for this young group of digital natives. These days, you'll often encounter teens having text message conversations or posting status updates while ignoring the very friends they're present with in the real world. Behavior like this could certainly send a message to the others that they are second priority to whomever else has engaged their friend's attention. That could easily lead to feelings of being "left out" as reported in this study.

And yet, at the same time, it's this very technology that's allowing the teens and young adults to feel like they have friends who know them and care about them.The issue is balancing that online life with the one out in the real world.

The question as to whether this sort of behavior is healthy is one best left to psychologists to analyze and report, but there's no doubt that at the very least, it is having an impact.

Image credit: flickr user Paulo Fehlauer

It's a major move being worked on with both the Activity Streams and Open Social communities - it could push the rest of the web, outside of Facebook, in a direction that supports radical app innovation through the creation of a level playing field of readable data. And it could make MySpace a lot better, too.

Keller told us today that MySpace is working on increasing the amount and sophistication of user activity updates on the site in a number of different ways. In case anyone is chuckling and thinking MySpace doesn't matter, we should remember that only ten sites on the web are visited more often than MySpace still today. MySpace may be on the decline, but it's still hugely important and these moves it's making could help it become even more so.

Adding "Write" Functionality

MySpaceID currently allows sites around the web to offer sign-in using MySpace account credentials. The sites can then pull in some amount of a user's data from MySpace and use it to personalize the experience they have on the new site - friends lists can be synced and taste information can be gleaned from a profile to customize recommendations, for example.

The next step will be to bring in user activities from these third-party sites and display them in your MySpace user activity feed, much like Facebook Connect allows. This gives other sites access to distribution inside MySpace. Developers of other sites will be able to offer users the option of publishing their activities on these other sites back onto their MySpace profiles and friends' activity feeds.

Here's how MySpace's plan is unlike what Facebook is doing. The updates will be marked up for the types of activities they represent with standardized microformat code, beginning with the events format hCal and soon to include the book, movie or other review format hReview. Those little bits of code that will be added could have big consequences.

Keller says the company acknowledges that this won't be a small task for third-party developers, so in the meantime she is working on automated methods of pulling user data in from other sites' Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and marking them up automatically, with the microformat code communicating what kind of updates they are (events, reviews, etc.)

Why This is Important

This kind of data normalization creates the level playing field of information that allows new applications to be written and scale up through accessing and processing large quantities of information that have effectively been translated into the same "language." You want to build an application that processes hCal events? That will be a lot more appealing when the MySpace ecosystem of connected sites is all speaking that language.

Keller says that MySpace and the community of people working on building a common Activity Streams specification for all sites have been working closely with the Open Social community, the Google-led cross-site application platform that competes with the Facebook App platform. Keller says MySpace's new activity feed functionality will be delivered from within but extend upon the Open Social framework the company uses to connect with other sites now.

There isn't any indication yet that MySpace will make these marked-up updates available in bulk to developers for analysis; they will likely remain authenticated and limited in visibility to friends who have given approval. That would be an even bigger boost for innovation, but the promotion of the standardized data format is a huge step nonetheless.

What's In It for MySpace?

So if this has a lot of potential to be good for the web - what's in it for MySpace? Two things, primarily.

First, as Facebook grows rapidly in both user numbers and integration with sites around the web through its similar product Facebook Connect, MySpace is no longer the center of the web for millions of people. This kind of product facilitates that kind of relationship, and offering outside developers write-access to MySpace will incentivize more of them to support ongoing user-connection with MySpace. The microformatted markup makes this a lot smarter than Facebook Connect, frankly.

There is a risk that all the smarts in the world won't interest people in MySpace's declining profile, but the site remains one of the most popular on the web and a viable competitor to Facebook. (Facebook said they may or may not comment on this move by MySpace; we're still waiting to see if they'd like to.)

The goal for the program that Keller shared with us was different. She says that the microformats markup will enable the company to make smarter decisions in highlighting friends' updates and offering users' recommendations.

Keller says that MySpace is working on and will soon deploy technology that closely monitors what kind of friend updates users show interest in. If I often click on your photos but never read your blog posts, or I am very interested in your book reviews but don't care about your events listings, then MySpace will feature those kinds of your updates in my friends' activity feeds more or less prominently. Knowing what kinds of activities are being brought in from other sites will help make that more possible. The same information will facilitate smarter recommendations of content you might like.

That's why Monica Keller says "We don't want to do anything without semantics, to be honest. We can't afford to show a user content on their home page that they aren't going to like."

Watch for these new technologies to be announced in the coming weeks. They could have a big impact not just on the future of MySpace, but on much of the rest of the web as well.