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DEMO, the conference where companies get six minutes on stage to present their product, kicked off this morning with VentureBeat's Matt Marshall talking social. "It's all about social," said Marshall, explaining that social media companies like Facebook have grown at an unprecedented pace. It took half a century for IBM to hit $1 billion, whereas it only took Facebook a handful of years, he said.

With that in mind, let's take a look at three companies that presented this morning at DEMO and hope to latch on to the ever-expanding social web.

Pope Benedict XVI delivered a message on social media and online communications today, telling Catholic Internet users to be respectful of others online and to not focus too much on their online popularity. The message was part of the church's annual World Day of Social Communications.

During his speech last year, Benedict had urged church leaders to embrace digital tools in order to communicate their message to laypeople. This year's message calls for those online to adopt a "Christian style presence" and to be "respectful and sensitive."

Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild, unregulated world. Facebook and LinkedIn, among other online social networks, are vast private communities that have thrived without oversight from any policy-making body. And new social networks are proliferating like bed bugs in a cheap hotel. As a result, trademark protection on social networks is becoming a serious concern for corporations.

Your personal and corporate reputation and popularity on these networks pivot on an identity known as your username. The role of usernames as brand identifiers is following a similar pattern as domain names but without any of the protections that trademarks owners enjoy.

Today, MySpace is launching what may be its last-ditch effort to save itself before owner News Corp makes other plans, or even sells off the ailing company.

With the launch of the "new MySpace," a social entertainment hub that allows for the discovery of music, celebrities, television, movies, games, videos, photos and offline events is revealed. But despite the company's radical changes and improved design, MySpace is still sending mixed signals about its future.

As we reported earlier this year, research from Cisco's Mid-Year Security Report found that 50% of end users admitted to accessing social media tools at work at least once a week, in spite of company rules. And another 27% have changed the settings on a company device to access prohibited sites or applications.

While social media sites are often viewed as a problem due to lower worker productivity, they're also a concern due to issues of security. Now that people have become more savvy about email security, they're using email less. And malware threats have followed them - from email to social networking sites.

The largest ever global research project into people's online activities has released its findings. The TNS Digital Life research involved 50,000 interviews with individuals in 46 countries, covering almost 90% of the world's online population.

The study aimed to uncover how the world's online behavior may be shifting, in terms of both consumption and communication. And among the findings were that online consumers in emerging, rapid growth markets are more engaged than those in mature markets, with Egypt and China, for example, having much higher levels of digital engagement than Japan, Denmark or Finland.

A new study from Forrester Research has found a decline in the number of content creators across social networking sites, even while general use and participation on these sites has risen. The group of users classified as "Creators" - those who record videos, post blog entries, write reviews and post comments to articles online - are less active this year than they were in 2009, with shrinking percentages of users in the majority of markets studied. In the U.S., for example, the Creators category dropped from 24% to 23%.

The dips in each region may not seem like a lot - usually only a percentage point or two - but Forrester analyst Jacqueline Anderson says there's still reason to be concerned.

When Apple launched Ping, its new music-focused social network found within iTunes 10, the response was decidedly lukewarm. The effort felt incomplete, as if its social features had been rushed out the door before the service was fully built. Ping lacked the most basic functionality, including the ability to rate non-music purchases and an inability to take into account your own music ratings. It also lacked personalized recommendations for artists to follow (apparently everyone likes Lady Gaga) and, at the last minute, Apple pulled Ping's Facebook integration, too.

Still, we cautioned that disappointed new users shouldn't give up on Ping yet - the features it needs to be successful aren't beyond Apple's grasp. And this weekend, Apple added two new features that prove the company isn't giving up on Ping yet, either.

If there's one thing we know about Web authors it's that they are constantly seeking new sources of traffic for their content. It doesn't matter if you're a blogger, a marketing manager or a small business owner, there is simply no reason to invest time with content creation and Web design if no one is coming to read it. For this reason, it's important to figure out where to actually invest time for the greatest ROI.

As a blogger I routinely asked myself the same question, until I finally realized that I (as the CEO of Woopra, the Web analytics company) had access to all the data I needed to make an absolute determination about which areas deserve the most attention.

As an early adopter of an unknown service called "The Facebook" back in 2004, it is impressive to see the growth and change that has come to the site. When many of the earliest members joined, a university email address from a select list of institutions was required to sign up. Eventually, nearly every college was opened up, then came high-schools and after that - everyone. Today marks another significant milestone in the history of the Web's most popular social network as Facebook has passed the 500 million user mark.