I was wrong - News Corp.’s Peter Chernin talked at length about MySpace and Fox Interactive Media on today’s quarterly earnings call. As expected, FIM revenue for fiscal 2008 (ending June 30) will be down about 10% from the original $1 billion projection. Revenue for the third fiscal quarter was $210 million, up 55% from a year ago but down 10% from the second fiscal quarter. For FIM to reach the new $900 million target, it needs to earn $270 million in the current quarter.

Key challenges to monetization, according to Chernin: huge quantity of ad inventory; the fact that ad models that marketers are used to (read: banners, search) don’t work as well in social media; and the difficulty of quantifying the economic value of a “friend” vs. other metrics from the TV and radio space that marketers are used to looking at.

Chernin acknowledged that growth is coming slower than expected at FIM. While he and other News Corp. execs did not explicitly say how much of FIM revenue is attributable to MySpace, in the past they have put it at about 80%, which works out to about $720 million in MySpace revenue in the current fiscal year.

23,857 Facebook applications later, the elephant in the room is making itself heard.

According to an analysis by Jesse Farmer, creator of the Adonomics application-stat-tracker, “the excitement over the Facebook Platform and its promise have waned. Application companies are branching out to other social networks not because they necessarily show more promise than Facebook, but because the future of the Facebook Platform has become murky.”

In a lengthy blog post, Farmer lays out the reasons for his viewpoint. First, activity in the Facebook developer forums has fallen off. Second, application activity has dropped off.

While he concentrates most of his argument on the forum activity, where developers post questions and talk business, it’s the application activity that marketers need to pay attention to. In one chart, he shows that between October 2007 and May 2008, the percentage of applications with at least 100 daily active users vs.  the total number of Facebook applications has dropped from around 27% to around 18%.

That speaks to the signal-to-noise ratio of Facebook but also to the challenge of promoting and virally spreading an app. Facebook has clamped down on developers that take advantage of friend networks, which is good, but it’s clear from this analysis that the viral infrastructure is also starting to crumble.

Whether this is a Facebook-only phenomenon or if it will spread to MySpace and other social networks is worth watching very, very closely.

This afternoon News Corp. reports quarterly revenues and many people expect Rupert, Peter et al to comment on the state of things at Fox Interactive Media and MySpace. Not too long ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that FIM would fall $100 million short of the $1 billion revenue goal for fiscal 2008 that Rupert Murdoch had set last June. Since then the media has been all over the idea the social networking is failing to monetize as quickly as everyone had hoped.

In recent earnings calls NWS has been a lot more open about the finances at FIM. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this call won’t answer many questions. NWS has one more quarter until the end of the fiscal year and I’m not sure how much they will offer in terms of guidance. A lot about FIM and MySpace is in flux, what with the ad sales reorganization and the launch of the new ad tech unit under Adam Bain. Plus, NWS has plenty else to talk about in other aspects of its business.

We’ll see in a couple of hours.

The BBC posts the results of an investigation into the security of personal information on Facebook. It created an application designed to mine user data and made up a fake profile. Then, it used the application to gain access to the personal information of “Bob Smith,” including his name, hometown, interests and school.

That applications can do this shouldn’t be surprising, since nearly every application requires you to allow it to access your profile in order for you to install it. Still, the reminder of this fact is unsettling.

For its part, Facebook defends its practices, saying in an online Q&A: “Access by applications to Facebook user data is strictly regulated and if we find that an application is in violation of our terms and policies, we take appropriate action to bring it into compliance or remove it entirely.” It also repeated the idea that users have the ability to report a rogue application.

The problem is that the way someone might become aware of their private information being misused is by it being, in fact, misused. What Facebook needs to do (and I’ve said this before) is to prevent personal data from being misused in the first place.

I promised I’d report back on my experience with Trendrr. I just checked and here is my graph of the appearance of the words ["social network" advertising skepticism] in Google News articles. Though I’ve been tracking since April 2, the chart only shows data from around April 16 and I can’t figure out how to change it.

At any rate, it’s not much of a data set, yet. However, it appears the data has been viewed 30 times so somewhere out there a few others are apparently interested in tracking the same thing.

In the meantime, Facebook just launched its own trend tracker, Lexicon. It tracks the mention of words on Wall posts. Interesting scraping technology at work here - all anonymous, of course, but there are bound to be some embarrassing and potentially hurtful things people will do with this. Will be interesting to watch.

This ad for “Seattle Hair Removal” appeared on my News Feed this morning. It’s one of those awkward moments when you wonder if it’s just spam or if Facebook has been checking my profile photo a bit too closely.

“Social Networking Wars” by Current TV.

First, apologies for the extended absense from posting. It’s not very blogger-like, I know. Between travel and presentations, my schedule got away from me.

TechCrunch reported yesterday that some developers are dissatisfied with Facebook. This is nothing new. What is new is the public debate over the (lack of) revenues developers are getting from being on Facebook. According to the blog post:

“The session started off with a disagreement over how much money developers are actually making through Facebook. Naval Ravikant from Venturehacks estimated that over $100M would be made in 2008, whereas Joyce Park of Renkoo and Matt Sanchez of VideoEgg predicted revenues as low as $10-35M this year.

All panelists agreed, however, that CPM rates on Facebook are miserably low, perhaps averaging 15 cents.”

I’ve believed for some time now that the widget and app space will not be the giant revenue generator that developers seem to think it is. Why? Too much clutter, not enough measurement, rogue apps, spam, to list a few quick reasons. Add in a messy US economy and things are starting to look dicey.

“We’ve only just begun….”

I hear that a lot lately when I talk to folks who are trying to figure out the best marketing models for brands to reach consumers in the social media realm. Though the skepticism over ad models for social networking is growing, some people lately seem to have very little hindsight.

Just think how far we’ve come already, from marketers building profile pages on MySpace to counting friends to tracking influencers to widgets and applications to Open Social. (OK, that last one’s just a maybe, since we haven’t exactly seen much from OS other than talk.)

And yet the conversation between brands and consumers has only just begun. It’s in that early, awkward stage. You know, the one where you run into a friend from college you haven’t seen in a long time and once you get past the “what are you up to” and “how many kids do you have” questions you start looking over their shoulder for something else to focus on. Or the conference cocktail party where you meet someone who wants to gab your ear off and you need to figure out how to gently extricate yourself. (No, this has never happened to me. I’m always interested in what you have to say. Always.)

John Battelle describes this uncomfortable dance in a recent Searchblog post:

In essence, brand advertising has been, up till now, an attempt to influence the conversation that potential consumers will have after experiencing the advertising. With conversational media and marketing, that concept is time shifting. Now brand advertising can *join* and even *initiate and convene* those brand conversations. And that requires a different skill set, one media folks are just starting to explore.

The key, as John says, is to find a marketing vehicle that works for brand, content producer and consumer. There will be a lot of awkward, uncomfortable conversations between brands and consumers in the future. But, like the best networkers, the brands that get the message right and know how to develop that first conversation into a lasting friendship will succeed.

I’ve just started playing around with a data-tracking tool called Trendrr. It allows you to create graphs that track keywords, photos, videos and blog mentions (among other things) for terms that you define. Then, you can view the things other Trendrr members are tracking and grab and post the graphs to your own Web page, social network page or PowerPoint presentation. (The latter is what I’m most interested in, since I have a presentation to give in a couple of weeks.)

One graph tracks news stories that mention “foreclosure” with news stories that mention “Britney Spears.” “Note the strong correlation,” the Trendrr member writes. And he/she is weirdly right.

The first thing I’m tracking is mentions of the terms (”social network” advertising skepticism) on Google Blogs and Google News. So far I’m not sure how to trend backwards (ie, for dates earlier than today) but it will be an interesting experiment. I’ll post results when I have them .

Trendrr will likely appeal to data wonks (like me) and to people with a passing interest in following what’s trendy online.