ReadWriteWeb

Oh how the mighty have fallen. The one time king of social networks, MySpace, now has the honor of being the site where the less affluent members of the online population stake their claims by way of bedazzled profiles overrun with auto-playing videos and songs. Meanwhile, the upscale, financially solvent users have moved on - and by moved on, we mean to Facebook, of course. At least those are the findings of the latest social networking study done by American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas.

Obsessed with Facebook? You're not alone. The hours you spend logging on to update your status, post photos, and make comments on friends' walls is not simply a "phase" you're going through which will end sometime soon. It's a ongoing trend affecting everyone these days and it has serious implications for the online advertising industry.

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.

If you're the kind of music lover with playlists strewn across multiple web services, then Twones is the tool for you. Twones is best described as Delicious or Friendfeed for streaming music. The early beta site allows users to bookmark and organize music from more than 23 music services including Last.fm, Hype Machine, MOG and even MySpace. The company offers an audio footprint of where you've been and once you install the Firefox toolbar, it will also track where you're going.

MySpace just announced that its users will now be able to sync their status updates with their Twitter feeds. MySpace users will be able to send their status updates on MySpace directly to Twitter and will also be able to import their Twitter updates to their MySpace feeds. This is currently just a beta product, but MySpace will roll this service out globally over the coming weeks.

Facebook just announced passing the 300 million active user mark. In early April ReadWriteWeb asked about the size of Facebook with the answer being - "bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world." As of today it's bigger than the population of all but 3 countries in the world and it's gaining on the US. Like any great nation, Facebook is asking it's citizens to pitch in. The company just launched Prototypes - a demo site for members to test early stage beta products. Similar to other lab environments, the company will offer users a chance to test new tools and give their feedback.

Two years ago Danah Boyd's article "Viewing
American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace" mesmerized marketers and tech journalists. Facebook was described as "hegemonic" while MySpace was the haven of "subaltern" teens. Whether Boyd intended it or not, Facebook became characterized as the privileged space of college kids and MySpace was plagued with the perception of lowbrow tackiness. At the time it made sense that a site for the privileged had less traffic. After all, isn't privilege generally exclusive? According to a recent Hitwise blog post Facebook is not only beating MySpace's traffic, it's the second ranked site overall in the US behind Google.

Despite the fact that he is perhaps one of the world's most famous gangsters, Al Capone wasn't first imprisoned for bootlegging, racketeering or the gangland execution of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. Instead, Capone was first imprisoned for tax evasion. Whether you're a law abiding citizen or a tax dodging criminal, there's something eerily omniscient about the taxman. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article by Laura Saunders, our all-seeing state revenue agents have increased their power to catch tax evaders through Facebook, MySpace and Google.

We just got an invitation to a MySpace press conference with MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta that will start at 11:45am PDT. We also just received news that MySpace did indeed enter into an agreement to acquire the music recommendation service iLike. The financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

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

Is it easier to talk to your online buddies than your friends out there in the "real world?" Do you feel like you know more about what's happening in the lives of your Facebook and MySpace friends than with those who don't have accounts or don't bother to update them? According to a recent UK MySpace study of over 16,000 social network users, these sorts of feelings are common among today's younger generation. The study revealed that a good portion of this group admits to feeling more comfortable sharing and communicating with friends online than they do when logged out of cyberspace.

MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code in order to comprehend what those updates are about and make more sophisticated update highlighting and recommendation decisions.

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.