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The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites. The document was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. Update: Facebook's Barry Schnitt contests this interpretation of the document, says the company is resistant to illegitimate government requests for user information and offers one example of that resistance in a comment posted below. The document also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking sites are. The EFF posted IRS training documents for using various internet tools as well, including Google Street View, but those were much tamer than the Justice file.

MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.

This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that? Is this something Facebook and Twitter ought to do? The MySpace announcement raises a number of interesting questions.

When MySpace announced earlier this week that they had now established themselves as the number one social networking application on the Android platform and the number three download overall, needless to say, we were a bit shocked. After all, (with no offense to MySpace intended), there are more Facebook users than MySpace users in the world. It's just a simple fact.

So how did this happen? Is the MySpace Android app that much better than Facebook's? Are Android users more interested in MySpace for some reason? Are they younger than other mobile users and therefore choosing MySpace over Facebook?

As it turns out, the truth is that measuring the mobile downloads of official applications may not be mean anything when it comes to measuring the success of social networking sites.

Protocols, protocols, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. OAuth, OpenID, UX, Shibboleth, SAML, XRI, FOAF, Facebook Connect, that is a small sampling of some of the technologies that have been invented to move Internet Identity forward forward for the web.

Today, at the Open ID User Experience Summit, a jaw-dropping statistic was given that 89% of users coming to LadyGaga.com chose a third-party logon rather than create a new account. "Signup with Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace" is the default option on LadyGaga.com - and it works.

Facebook is about to become a quieter, less annoying place for users. The company just announced that it has deprecated "application notifications" and will require apps to use other, less intrusive methods of sending news to users. It's a big step in the ongoing anti-MySpace-ification of Facebook. Though to be fair, MySpace recently instituted something similar. Now your "notifications" section on Facebook will just be for things like comments left on your posts.

It's a good move that puts the interests of users ahead of short-term benefits for app developers and monetization.

Twitter made news today for announcing that it now sees an average of 50 million status messages posted each day. A sharp growth curve indicates that activity on Twitter could grow much higher in the short term future. Good old MySpace says it can't be counted out yet, though.

MySpace told me tonight that it still sees 1 billion status messages per month, divided by 30 days that's about 33 million status messages per day. That means until just last Fall, MySpace was still bigger than Twitter.

For months, we've been fielding rumors (and filtering out the facts) about MySpace's proposed redesign and rebranding.

Tonight's report on TechCrunch outlines a few minor details of the overall plan to stop the site's hemorrhaging users and stem its financial decline. As we've known (and as we predicted last year), the site will shift its emphasis from pure social networking to content discovery and recommendation. The site's tagline is expected to change to "Discover and Be Discovered."

Everybody is getting in the game. Google just announced Buzz, its social feed add-on to Gmail, last week and today Microsoft is bringing the feed to Outlook. Microsoft first announced its social media add-on, the Outlook Social Connector, last November but today begins the public beta period for LinkedIn for Outlook. The company has also announced partnerships with Facebook and Myspace.

MySpace and Google just announced that starting today, status updates from MySpace users will appear in Google's real-time search. MySpace announced its real-time Stream API in December and Google launched its real-time search feature just a day before the MySpace announcement. While Google was one of MySpace's launch partners (together with OneRiot), it took Google until today to include MySpace updates in its real-time search.

This morning Canadian startup accelerator Bootup Labs showcased some of its program graduates at Plug and Play Center's Sunnyvale location. While a number of the companies show promise, it was a gaming product that caught our attention. DimeRocker is offering developers a chance to elevate the level of gaming experiences and monetization on sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo.