The social networking hysteria continues to bubble and thrive, and Flock is feeding the frenzy with a new browser aimed at the socially addicted.

Mashable describes the new beta browser as incorporating plug-ins from Meebo, Flickr and a total of 15 social services. Social networking remains the favorite child of Web 2.0 as people are signing up for and using Twitter, Facebook et al until their fingers hurt and their families are wanting of attention.

I get that connecting with friends and finding new ones is made easier through these various tools, but I can't help but see this as a fad that in a few years won't be nearly as life changing as some believe it to be today. Social networking can be professionally advantageous and help to reach out to old friends, but if they were that important, losing contact shouldn't have happened in the first place. I can see young folks needing to coordinate activities, but when talking about your life takes more hours per day than you use to participate in leisure activities, then something is out of whack.

There are too many services that take up too much time, and eventually the need to update one's Flickr page and blog 3x times a day will fade away. Years ago everyone wanted a Geocities page too, but that ship sailed thanks to new technologies and the return of consumers to old one.

Social networking features - sharing photos, text message alerts and blogging - existed before Web 2.0 and will continue to do so afterwards to a greater degree, but I seriously doubt today's pace can be maintained.

If you actively participate in more than 2 social services, it's probably too many to also manage work, sleep and family life. Using a separate browser to accommodate more than a dozen social sites might indicate the need for an intervention.

Google this week tried to appease media companies by announcing a new filtering process for identifying copyrighted video from YouTube, but apparently it wasn't enough.

The system identifies videos it believes are protected by copyright and gives media companies the option of advertising against or blocking the videos. This is akin to the old saying about trying to get the horses back in the barn after the door was left open -- it's already too late.

The leading media companies, including Disney, Fox, NBC and Viacom are jointly working on guidelines for copyright protection. A watermarking system for video delivered via DVD or on TV would be a good start at prevention. Another alternative would be face recognition software -- if there's a video that contains Angelina Jolie in it, the odds are someone has a copyright to it.

Google should minimally set up a holding bin where videos could be analyzed before they go live on YouTube. The media companies need to cooperate with YouTube and perhaps beat uploaders to the punch by making high quality watermarked copies of videos available to the YouTube database. The Daily Show or clips from House or Grey's Anatomy, should be readily available (with their advertising) via YouTube, giving viewers no reason to watch the pirated versions. This would generate revenue for all parties.

Add Microsoft to the list of mashup mavens. Popfly made its official debut this week at the Web 2.0 Summit, according to Mashable.

Their "hit" is a Popfly, a rather odd title for a mashup technology. The visual interface requires no coding to bring in widgets from social networking services and data streams such as RSS feeds. Popfly is built on Silverlight technology, MS' media player.

Intel, Yahoo, Google, and a bazillion startups all offer mashup technology. Popfly has a better chance than most of these for success because of the huge volume of web services that Microsoft can expose, if it chooses to do so. Facebook and MySpace have substantial development communities, but that's nothing compared to what Microsoft can tap into.

Security and privacy concerns will limit access to some of the features, but expect Microsoft, which hits mostly pop flies and not homeruns online, to go all out for its mashup technology.

It's deja vu all over again in Silicon Valley, as web startups with little to no revenue are easily finding investors or companies willing to pay 7-8 figures for them.

The New York Times outlines some of the over valuations. A bubble is occurring, this one based on the belief that the community of the web will generate huge sums through advertising to people foregoing other media.

The previous bubble was fueled by the belief that online shopping would largely replace retail, but of course that never happened. This bubble is centered on the misplaced belief that advertising dollars can sustain the plethora of personalized content (largely user generated) including video.

In some ways bubble 1.0 was more believable because at least it centered on moving product. Now the future is hinged on advertising and media that will help to move product through advertising, so it's twice the challenge. Community will be absorbed by mainstream publishers who will reap the most benefit.

So if history repeats itself, the next bust will occur in around May of 2009, just after the next President takes a seat in the Oval Office. Get out before you get sucked in.

Skype is hoping that talking via PC becomes as popular as IM chatting via its deal with MySpace. At face value MySpace seems to get the better of the deal that lets MySpace IM users connect via Skype for free. Skype will share in the revenue when MySpace users who call land lines via Skype.

Skype doesn't get any direct financial benefit from the deal, but the added exposure to an audience likely to want to save money on phone calls can't hurt a company that was vastly overvalued.

John Delaney, principal analyst at consulting firm Ovum says: “It seems pretty clear what MySpace gets out of this deal: a competitive differentiator. MySpace is big and still fast-growing; but it has been feeling heat from the more rapid audience growth seen by rival Facebook in recent months.”

“It’s likely, then, that the main benefit that Skype will get from this deal is not money, but brand exposure. Most of MySpace’s users are in the US, and Skype’s brand has not been as strong in that market as it is in Europe.”

Opening up the Skype API to allow it to be integrated with other IM applications is a smart long term bet for getting more users. Remaining in the background as a technology provider could be Skype's path to growth.

RSS is like TiVo in many ways. Both are favorites among tech savvy consumers who find them indispensable, and both have fallen far short of their potential so far. But just as a groundswell of knockoff DVRs is growing the market for the automatic recording of TV, RSS continues to grow in popularity as part of the mashup and Web 2.0 information delivery shifts.

The backers of RSS and TiVo haven't done a great job of marketing. TiVo hasn't made clear its advantages -- never be forced to channel surf or miss a favorite program again -- while RSS continues to be something users must know about and actively seek on a page.

Robert Scoble estimates about 10 million people are using RSS feeds today, but he doesn't count all of the folks who are unknowingly participating through aggregation pages.

Between the customized pages of Google, Yahoo, AOL, Flickr, MySpace and Yahoo, and the hundreds of widgets, RSS adoption likely several times the 10 million Scoble guesses.. If you look at Google's customization page, you'll see that 3.5 million people have add CNN headlines to their Google page alone, and those headlines are delivered via RSS. There's a big difference between people who use RSS readers versus people who read things delivered via RSS.

Before long we should see about half of all web users adopting RSS in some capacity, and Yahoo is determined to increase that number. Publishers and marketers need to do more however. RSS feeds are still way to hard to find, including the orange buttons, and the browsers don't are likewise to subtle in encouraging adding RSS feeds.

Marketers could also do more to promote themselves via RSS. Amazon.com etc. should create RSS feeds of new relevant products, and they should take a page from the portals (literally) and allow customization on their home pages.

The internet itself, Facebook, and the iPod all once had only a few million users too. If you want a savvy readership today and bigger audience tomorrow, then spread the RSS love.

Target marketing firm Acxiom is simplifying the connection between advertisers and individuals previously shown to have interest in their category of products by integrating research data into its ad network.

Acxiom's Echo Target ad network matches advertisers to target demographics using the Relevance-X technology that leverages the PersonicX "household-level segmentation system" that draws on data from the company's InfoBase-X database of behavioral data. (I'm guess these folks are big fans of X-Men, but can you please standardize on hyphen or no hyphen with the X?)

Acxiom places each U.S. household into one of "70 unique clusters and 21 different life stages, based on the household's specific consumer and demographic characteristics, including shopping, media, lifestyle and attitudinal information."

Cutting through the marketing-ese, what it boils down to is a more precise segmentation of consumers based on what they like to buy based on their age, location, income, and prior buying habits. Income and gender only tell us so much about a person, so tying in prior behaviors is key to increase the CPMs and click-through-rates. Having an extensive database and schema for categorization should improve the results for advertisers.

Content Management System company Sitecore is now offering a module that integrates SEO into the content creation process. The software analyzes page content as it being is created for its SEO, including the use of tags, headings, and keywords. This can greatly enhance marketers' ability to rank highly while avoiding period SEO overhauls.

The module tracks keywords placement and density so that publishers can insert the words that will increase your SEO ranking in the major search engines before hitting the save button.

The software automatically moves the navigation to the bottom of the page to optimize ranking, according to Darren Guarnaccia, VP of Product Marketing at Sitecore. He says the software does no blackhat tricks, but it generates a valid page that puts the most relevant content at the top of the page.

The software also checks to make sure that all image, H1, and meta tags are present as well as checking for broken links. By checking the content as the final step before publishing, Guarnaccia says the software prevents "drift" that can occur as a site that was once optimized loses its ranking because of additional content that is not optimized.

Sitecore's CMS generates SEO-friendly URLs, preventing the common oversight of using numbers or codes in the URLs of individual pieces of content. For media companies, thinking in SEO terms when authoring content can be a shock, but when using Sitecore editors can minimally consider how well the page will rank.

Sitecore runs on Microsoft's IIS platform and uses .NET technology, and the company has no plans for Linux support. It also includes Wiki and blog creation modules that will increase community and further enhance SEO ranking. Guarnaccia says the SEO technology was developed in house. Sitecore is priced between $40-60,000, and the SEO module is an additional $3,000.

The percentage of web users who watch TV shows online has doubled from last year, growing from 8 to nearly 16 percent, according to a new report by The Conference Board and research firm TNS. The convenience of watching on demand as well as avoiding commercials are the primary drivers.

The percentage of viewers who watch online to catch up on episodes that were missed rose from 30 to 42 percent. All is not lost for advertisers though.

"If advertisers can effectively leverage the online video platform, we should see much more interactivity and emotional connection between brands and the online TV viewing audience," according to Shari Morwood, E.V.P of Technology, Telecommunications and Media at TNS.

I am guessing that before the decade is over more than half of all TV viewing will not be live. Between DVRs, on demand and online viewing, there is no reason that viewers must set schedule their lives around prime time. Media companies must develop coordinating advertising programs that enable reaching the audience across all of these opportunities.

I couldn't believe what I was reading this morning in AdWeek. Web 2.0 is going to kill advertising across all media, according to "author" Andrew Keen.

Here's some of Keen's rantings:

Web 2.0 advertising is like user-generated content: inane, ephemeral and annoying. In a word: worthless....

But the supposed "freedom" of Web 2.0 is creating inferior and often corrupt content, which in turn results in fewer credible advertising opportunities for discriminating buyers...

It can be measured everywhere, in falling CPM and the failure of social networks to develop viable business models.

Keen could have been talking about cable TV and reality programming's potential to disrupt network TV -- too much choice, low value content, and an erosion of ad dollars.

He has no clue. Yes, user-generated content, blogging and social networks should be valued differently today than mainstream media, and yes, they are stealing market share. But they are filling a need for content (for better or worse) from consumers that must be met, and old media is doing its part to cash in as well.

Advertising around web 2.0 is in active labor today, with all of the pain, mess (and beauty) that comes with the experience. Ad buyers and agencies will have to work harder through decentralized publishing networks to reach their target audience. But through interactive and targeted content, the link between advertiser and consumer can be made stronger, just as online community has brought publishers and consumers together as never before.

So you can listen to Keen and be a fuddy-duddy crying into your single-malted scotch about the good old days, or you can see the new disruptive opportunity for what it is and teach the new kids on the block a thing or two based on your experience.

Advertising won't die. But it will never be the same.