Too much money spent on social websites just to be the one to benefit from the advertising fruits. The last one was Microsoft that bought a piece of Facebook after a 240 million dollar deal. Microsoft start a new advertising concept on Facebook which os "Social ads" which allows advertisers to target costumers by age, gender and interests.
The biggest deal in the social networking market was with Myspace, considered as the number one in social networking, Google was interested on it. It was a $900 Million dollar deal on search and contextual ads. Myspace membership is growing by 5 million a month which makes ads on it gets a huge number of users.
The smallest deal was the partnership between Yahoo and Bebo. Bebo considered as the third social network in USA and counts about 1.7 million user.
Now as we see there is a competition between giants if Internet industry to get the social networks. After every one of the gets his piece of social networking i think the new challenge is how to get more users to the network. Myspace is number one but the gap between it and Facebook is too small. Every social network have to care about security and privacy issues because vulnerability to hackers is very bad for its reputation. Recently we heard about hacking Alicia Keys Myspace page.
Second, Google is making a great work to attract people to Myspace by making it an open social. This will allow developers to make many open source application around Myspace. Consequently this will create a space to creative minds to attract users. In the other hand microsoft is so determinant to fix her network losses and put a huge budget to expand her online revenue.
