Brett Brewer, one of the co-founders of MySpace’s parent company InterMix Media, which News Corp. bought in 2005, believes that Facebook has won in the battle for Social Networking supremacy… for now. He goes on to warn that Facebook could be usurped in the next few years by a social networking startup that offers better functionality for mobile phones.

In his white paper “The Black Gold of the 21st Century – Social Data Flows & Analytics”, Alan Moore states that it is expected by 2015, five billion people will be connected to the internet via a mobile device.

This won’t please Mr. Murdoch one bit after all of the money that his News Corp paid out for MySpace as it seems destined to slip in relevance. It appears to be typical old school media thinking, buy and dominate. The part of the story that the old dinosaurs seem to fail to understand is that given the pace of technology developments these days, innovation is the key to the game.

Why did Facebook rise to become so popular and overtake MySpace? Because it offered new and easier ways to connect with people, and manage those connections. The same will happen again as mobile media comes to the forefront of the consumer market.

Peoples needs and expectations continue to change as the technology they use changes, which at this point, is only quickening.

Sixty percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) intend to spend more than half of their total budgets on internet marketing in the next 12 months, a new survey has found.

This is likely to result in a decline in expenditure on more traditional channels of marketing, the poll by Rackspace indicated. The survey found that out of 130 marketing bosses, 61 per cent will make the online medium their biggest outlet in 2009, despite 40 per cent saying they have had difficulties in the past due to technical problems, New Media Age reports.

However, the majority of respondents said they believed the effectiveness of social networking campaigns in an online strategy was limited, with only 35 per cent of CMOs stating that they thought the online medium offered the best results transparency.

Furthermore, the survey showed that not enough marketers are considering website performance when rolling out new campaigns – fewer than half (48%) of respondents said that they took steps to make sure their websites could cope with higher traffic levels when running an internet marketing campaign.

Last month, TNS Media Intelligence research found that US advertising spending was on the decline, with a 1.6 per cent drop during the first half of 2008.

However, online advertising was one of the few sectors that bucked the trend, with spend increasing by eight per cent. A recent eMarketer report suggested that spending on search marketing in the UK will rise to more than £2 billion by the end of this year. While in the U.S., a recent study commissioned by the American Marketing Association and carried out by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University revealed that US business-to-business product marketers intend to increase online spending by 12.87 per cent in the next 12 months, eMarketer reports.

Dean DeBiase of TNS remarked: "It appears marketers are placing an emphasis upon enhanced efficiencies for their brands and the ability to engage with well-defined audiences to ensure ever greater return on investment."

Social networking sites are enticing more people to them than porn sites. A recent study by Bill Tancer, a self-described "data geek" and General Manger of the Internet tracking company Hitwise, has concluded that porn searches have gone flaccid while people seem to be more interested in social intercourse. He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased, young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites.” Tancer said.

Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters", said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people's behavior. 

Tancer said the change in communication patterns was one of the most noticeable shifts in society in the past five years — a key point for marketers seeking to learn about their audiences.

In terms of behaviour, Tancer says his study also shows searches for anti-depression drugs spike around Thanksgiving, people are more interested in tropical storms since Katrina.

Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined – and there is no sign that this is waning.

This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.

"A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families," he said.