Facebook is unveiling a redesign (left) which replaces its friend-tracking News Feed feature with the Stream. The biggest difference: Corporate Facebook pages, for which users sign up to be "fans," can now place stories in the Stream much more frequently than they did with the News Feed.

Through a feature called Facebook Connect, Facebook already collects activities on other websites — like Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Digg headline votes, (and, yes, comments on Gawker Media sites like Gawker and Valleywag) — and posts them in the News Feed. Those will become even more prominent in the Stream.

The result: Facebook profiles will show less of what your real friends are doing, and more of what corporate pals like Starbucks and Ben & Jerry's are up to.

Facebook is not alone. Twitter's investors have been hinting that they're going to make money by helping companies have a presence on the site and get their messages out to users. It's not advertising like old-school banners or Google's text ads — it's something new, and more insidious.

Valley insiders call it "lifestreaming," but a more common term is "aggregation." ("Lifestreaming" is not to be confused with "lifecasting," which means broadcasting your life 24/7 on a mobile webcam.)

The trend was arguably pioneered by FriendFeed, a startup little-known outside Silicon Valley founded by some ex-Googlers. Like Facebook, FriendFeed pulls together updated of users' activities from across multiple websites and lets users comment on them. It has mostly been embraced by crazed early adopters who sign up for every new website that comes along. For people who have never heard of Plurk or Reddit or BrightKite, it's not as useful today — but the startup's ambitions have nevertheless sparked a competitive race for a market that barely exists today.

Google, the current king of online advertising, is racing to catch up to FriendFeed and Facebook. Last year, it poached Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz, who formerly oversaw Flickr and other social websites, to run a secret social-networking project. We hear that's coming to fruition, and may be based on Google's Blogger blogging site, which already has user profiles. (Orkut, a Google-owned social network, will probably fall by the wayside; it is losing ground to Facebook in the few countries, like Pakistan, where it has dominated.)

Yahoo, even without Horowitz, has been proceeding with a plan to build a social profile; it may launch next month, according to a Yahoo insider. And AOL spent $850 million on also-ran social network Bebo, which is now merging with its AOL Instant Messenger chat client, in an effort to catch up to the lifestreaming trend. Microsoft, too, is experimenting with a social update service.

The goal with all of these is the same: Gather up users' scattered online lives, and then daub the result with personalized, real-time ads. Instead of waiting for you to search for something, advertisers will target every step you take on the Internet.

The irony, as ever in Silicon Valley, is that everyone is racing to corner a market that may not exist. Twitter is arguably the purest lifestreaming startup around, and it's not making any money at all; all of its business schemes are currently just dreams. Facebook's expenses grow with every user it adds. And yet Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL seem convinced that lifestreaming is a business they need to be in. Could it be, in the end, that our lives are not interesting enough for a commercial break?

well, at least she admits to it; there is very little "original thought" out there, from academia to business — its all on the shoulder of giants.

I think this also goes to show how an idea can hit a market over and over, but until that market "ecosystem" is ready to grow that idea into a hit, well, you are pounding sand. There were quite a few different variations of social networks way before facebook, zuckerburg just hit the lotto on timing.

theres a lot of smart people out there in the tech world, who work hard and have good strategies —- but just like in life, sometimes the difference is a coin toss.

give her credit for seeing the upside; she kept attacking that niche until it hit.

Ringo, their first social site, was an unabashed copy of Friendster. The husband-and-wife team sold that off to Monster, the job-listings site, for a pittance — but a pittance that provided the seed funding for Bebo, which Xochi openly says was inspired by MySpace. Copy early, copy often, sell out. (Photo by Auren Hoffman)

Born on March 16, 2005 as "an innovative and engaging way for people to share their lives, leverage their community and get the most out of their online experience," according to Yahoo's then-COO Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo 360 isn't technically dead yet. But it's proved unpopular enough for Yahoo to try to replace it at least four times with the social networks listed below.

Yahoo tried to replace 360 by offering $1 billion for Facebook in the summer of 2006. Mark Zuckerberg almost took the deal — but then Yahoo CEO Terry Semel scotched the deal by cutting the price. That's when Mark's sister Randi sang "Fuck you, Yahoo, they're going IPO!"

Yahoo began talks with also-ran social network Bebo, reportedly offering to buy it for $1 billion in May 2007. The deal never happened. AOL bought Bebo for $850 million earlier this year.

Less than a year ago came Yahoo Mash, a social network that allowed a user's friends to "mess" with each other's pages like they were Wikipedia entries. Eventually, Yahoo's Terrell Karlsten told Wired in October 2007, "it will become a feature inside other services. For example, it's possible that you'll log into Yahoo Mail and see your profile along with all of your friends' profiles in your contact list."

In November 2007, Yahoo launched a LInkedIn-like site for recent college graduates called Kickstart. But by January 2008, site lead Scott Gatz had already left the company and management began to cut Kickstart's marketing budget because no one was signing up.

It shows that, yes, kids today are using posts and pokes to flirt, but they're also using social networking sites to share sex ed with each other. What's not to like about a new generation of honest, well-informed sluts? And with 93 percent using social-network communities regularly, at least they're faithful to the sites that bring them together.

The stated budget for the series of twelve episodes is $3 million, and the magazine, along with production partner IMG, will guarantee 83.4 million video views on social network Bebo alone — which works out to $35 per thousand, plus whatever Vogue takes off the top. The show will also be distributed on Hulu and Veoh, and on Vogue's online video outlet Vogue.tv, so any views over and above the Bebo number brings the CPM, or cost per thousand views, down for Express.

As one fashionista friend remarked, you wouldn't think Vogue would even let Express advertise in the magazine. Trendy knockoff retailer H&M would seem the better fit. But then I'll be getting enough product placement from the new season of Project Runway.

If we're the shareholder, we're not calmed. MySpace is far more popular in the U.S. than Bebo. Despite that, ad partner Google still can't figure out how to make money off it. Why doesn't Bewkes just admit it? He had other things in mind when he bought Bebo. (Photo by AP/Peter Kramer)

Hot air balloon rides and circus performers. But then it would be difficult to fit either into 1015 Folsom, where the party is being held tomorrow night. As for the rest of Bebo's original employees? They've all left already.

Bewkes has been trying, on and off, to swap AOL and a fistful of cash for a 20 percent stake in Yahoo, which would help CEO Jerry Yang fend off both Microsoft and Carl Icahn. Yahoo executives aren't particularly interested in having AOL's aging Internet assets dumped on them to manage — but they were eager to buy Bebo, particularly Yahoo Europe head Toby Coppel. Yahoo has a deal to sell ads on Bebo in Europe, a deal that most expect AOL to do away with after it expires. Buying Bebo serves to makes AOL more attractive to Yahoo — and if that gets AOL off Time Warner's back, then it may be $850 million well spent.

Somebody said that we were allowed to wreck the house because the birthday girl's parents were getting divorced and there were kids behaving like gangsters from a rap video, throwing stuff around and smashing things. There were chairs, tables, even a TV in the pool.

Seriously, Beboers, If you're going to start sucking up to your new overseers, you should brush up on your corporate culture clashes. The "overlords" line had its start on a Simpsons episode. The Simpsons is produced by an arm of News Corp. AOL is a unit of Time Warner, whose top executives despise News Corp. For maximum obsequiousness, try picking up lines from Friends instead. That TV series was produced by Warner Bros.