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Bill Tancer, Hitwise GM of Global Research recently wrote about MySpace's departure as a top traffic generator for entertainment and music sites. Says Tancer, "MySpace was the most significant contributor of traffic to entertainment - multimedia sites providing over 35% of traffic to the category...that percentage now hovers below 10%."

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.

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."

What do supermodel Veronica Webb, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf all have in common? Besides wealth and celebrity, they're all connected to today's launch of Talenthouse entertainment network. The site promises to be a space where creators in film, fashion, visual art, music and photography showcase their work for collaboration and discovery. Scharf is Talenthouse's CEO, while Dorff and Webb have agreed to invite community members to contribute to upcoming projects.

According to the release, Talenthouse "empowers all artists to create original content, collaborate with each other and become recognized by a global audience." I know what you're thinking. Apart from the flashy graphics and Bono voice over, how is this different from YouTube or MySpace?

The year was 2013. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg was still the social network's public persona, but he had a young family and new-found loves of world travel, exotic regional cocktails and faux-native art. Facebook had become overgrown with spammy apps and awkwardly targeted advertisements. The company quietly gave Zuckerberg a huge salary to pursue those other interests and leave product development and the business in the hands of other people. There was no denying it - Facebook was on the decline as Social Network XYZ rose to global social networking supremacy.

But what in this future scenario will Social Network XYZ be? As the sands of time wash MySpace into obscurity, with a wave of hundreds of employees being let go this week for example, now seems like a good time to think about what comes next. What could kill Facebook, the MySpace killer? We've identified four possible scenarios - which do you think is most likely? Most desirable?

According to a new study from Nielsen, Internet users spend more time on social networks and blogs in May 2009 than ever before. The total number of minutes increased 82% year-over-year. Unsurprisingly, Twitter saw the largest gain in total new users among social networks, with a 1,448% increase in visitors from May 2008 to May 2009. Users also started to spend far more time on Twitter in recent months. In May 2008, the average user spent about 6 minutes on Twitter.com, while this number has now grown to more than 17 minutes (Note: as far as we can see these numbers don't seem to take users who use third-party clients into account).

It is important to note, though, that Twitter's growth has slowed down dramatically over the last two months, as both the time per person spent on the site and Twitter's month-over-month growth only increased slightly since April 2009.

The Internet (or at least Twitter and MySpace) bade farewell to Trent Reznor and Stephanie Meyer respectively, if not respectfully, last week. Each of them blamed incessant harassment by trolls for their departures.

Some may roll their eyes and dismiss these complaints as thin-skinned... but it's hard to underestimate just how debilitating the deluge of abuse can be. While XKCD offered one ingenious solution to the problem, and others are suggesting an end to anonymity online, I'm inclined to agree with Sarah Perez, who suggests the only real answer, for now, is that celebrities who can't cope with the torrent of crap should staff up with a communications team to handle it for them.

It is no secret that Facebook has Twitter envy. The number one social networking site is not content to win over rival MySpace. It is not satisfied being far ahead of Google on the social web. Facebook now has Twitter firmly in its crosshairs.

True, Twitter traffic has gone through the roof. True, Twitter is the new killer app, the new cool kid on the block. And yes, even Oprah now loves Twitter. But does this mean Facebook should be worried? Well, maybe yes, but likely no, because Twitter and Facebook are two very different services.

Posters on the wall, teen magazines, boom boxes playing the same stupid songs over and over again (automatically!) - that's not a sustainable situation, by definition. That's teenage living and that's what MySpace built its huge site on. Just like being a teenager, MySpace is something that most people grow out of. Today marked an important point in the internet's move beyond MySpace.

The company ushered Tom out the door today from President into an advisory role is in talks with Tom about a new role if he leaves his post as President, and replaced its CEO with former Facebook business exec Owen Van Natta. Increased revenue isn't really what MySpace needs, if it's to stay strong it needs to stop bleeding users. That's not likely.

In a new report, Nielsen Online takes a closer look at how social media and video sites have reshaped the web and the online advertising market over the last few years, especially in the context of the current economic crisis. According to Nielsen, since 2003, the time spent on video sites has increased by over 2,000%, and the number of Americans who visit online video sites like YouTube and Hulu has climbed 339% over the same time period.

With regards to the economy, a number of sectors, including retail, and the auto and financial services industries, have obviously made dramatic cuts to their online spending. On the other hand, the pharmaceutical industry is actually spending more on online ads today.