I've given a lot of credit to Facebook here in the past for keeping to the mission of relevant social networking. Unlike MySpace, which is too busy monetizing attention, hungry Facebook continues to roll out innovations that focus on social interaction. Facebook is now tapping the social well to solicit feedback -- and perhaps gather grassroots support -- for future innovations. The PR aspect is savvy given their previous debacle with the news feed feature introduction. The feature was a perfectly good service -- perhaps like the Bush administration's sacking of the eight Deputy Attorney's General -- but poorly received in the absence of a pre-launch PR or opinion massaging.

The vehicle for the feedback is the Facebook Sneak Preview group manned by a dozen or so product managers who post images and descriptions of proposed changes. Users can comment under the pictures or post other feedback in the discussion board.

At the moment, three pictures of changes are being presented, two streamlining user interaction with profiles and messaging. There's a lot of mindnumbing details that I won't bore you with here. The last picture deals with the introduction of a page for every network on the Facebook site. The example page is shown for UCLA and includes a number of statistics that was exhibited briefly from the pulled zeitgeist experiment. In that experiment, key stats about gender, relationship status, etc, for the whole system were aggregated on one page. Now, those same stats are compiled and presented for each network.

Salesforce.com joins the ranks of IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, etc. in bringing social networking, popularized by MySpace, to the corporation. AppSpace is to be an interaction space for customers, with ties to AppExchange. Launched at the beginning of this year and now just a showcase for applications, AppExchange is scheduled to be a fully functional marketplace for applications by the end of the year. AppSpace will permit the sharing of applications acquired from AppExchange, and expected social features include collaboration, blogs and wikis.

MSN Soapbox -- Microsoft's YouTube -- effort went public beta two weeks ago and our impression was nice effort but too late. The interface works well and the videos integrate -- albeit not smoothly -- with the Spaces and Live properties. Late to the game, they are not likely to gain a critical mass of user generated content. But with the infrastructure to the TV set of Xbox 360 and Vista Media Center, they have the long term potential for establishing an alternative route to the TV.

This latest development won't draw much attention but will be looked back as a pioneering effort in bridging the Web to TV: the latest beta iteration, v0.8.5, of Mobileware's Big Screen Headlines application for Vista Media Center now supports Soapbox Media RSS feeds. "Big Screen Headlines ... allows you to monitor and read text RSS feeds, as well as watch and listen to podcasts and video podcasts." Though the Soapbox site uses a Flash player, the feed itself links to a Media Center playable wmv stream. This bridge won't work for YouTube or Google video. We don't see many people besides early adopters watching internet videos this way for now, but it does establish the potential of the platform.

eMarketer just published an article projecting that MySpace will take the lions share 61% or $525 million dollars of estimating $865 million in 2007 total ad spending; second tier sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Piczo, Friendster, etc will share $200 mil; third tier portal sites such as MSN Spaces, Yahoo! 360, AIM Pages, Orkut, etc will take $95; while vertical and marketer-sponsored social networks will take the $45 remainder.

The report cited in the article was written in back October 2006 and reflects MySpace's primacy at the time. However, the same article confirms Facebook's emerging dominance with the 17-25 set. When asked in a poll to list their three favorite sites, Facebook is preferred to MySpace by females 2 to 1 and by males nearly 3 to 1. Based on our observation, teens are now getting into Facebook as early as high school, cementing their use by the end of college and keep it their top social networking platform after graduation. We are also seeing a huge migration of twenty-somethings from MySpace who were not exposed to Facebook in college. The age bracket preferring Facebook will widen to 17 - 30 if not 12 - 30 in five years.

Facebook recently revealed 2.9% growth month over month. Assuming that rate persists for 52 weeks, that's 340% annualized. The 10 million users in Fall 2006 cited in the article is already way outdated. The most recent number is 18 million. Same time next year the number will be 79 million users while MySpace will see much less growth if not decline from its current saturation of the domestic market.

The other issue is traffic quality. If you've been reading our reports, much of the traffic on MySpace now is spam. Reading and deleting junk messages inflates the page count enormously while the traffic on Facebook is still relatively honest, though that has been changing too to a more commercial character.