Social network Me.dium is putting the power of its people into a new social search system. The search tool will combine the new Yahoo Search BOSS platform with results collected from Me.dium social sidebars and toolbars. The toolbars are used by participants to share and endorse websites with others within the network, much like StumbleUpon , from which data Me.dium can rank sites based on popularity. Current figures put the number of URLs shared each day by Me.dium users at over 20 million.

As well as popularity, or crowd rank, website content will also be ranked using crowd level, recent activity and average visit duration. This information is then wrapped around the Yahoo search results.

The move should see social media websites being healthily represented in results returned by the social media search tool. More blogs and news articles will appear in the top results and more up-to-the minute content will be displayed based on what people are looking at in that moment in time, and being constantly updated in real-time.

“Me.dium’s Social Search gives you a new and unique layer of information that was never available before,” said Kimbal Musk , CEO of Me.dium. “Using the activity of our community and our real time technology platform, users see search results ranked by what the crowds are surfing right now.”

Are social networks such as Facebook and MySpace over-valued today? The price tags we put on them are steep in my opinion - in the billions of dollars! Although, are these sites and other online communities just a fad that will be replaced by the next big ‘It’ technology shortly down the line, or will they all see a long and prosperous future?

MySpace was a huge success in its early days and managed to stay on top for a good while. However, many people today consider that MySpace, as a brand, has lost its champion title to Facebook.

I slightly digress from my original thoughts but want to put this perception to the test and undergo a couple of benchmarking tests.

Step One - The Site Traffic Test

I got some interesting results whilst conducting a traffic rank comparison between Facebook and MySpace on traffic ranking site, Alexa. For your reference, all the following figures are based on a snapshot of a three month average.

MySpace receives a traffic rank of 6 [this traffic rank is based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach)]. The number of unique pages viewed per user per day on MySpace is 34.52.

Facebook comes in just behind MySpace with a traffic rank of 7. The number of unique pages viewed per user per day on Facebook is 21.26.

The graph above, however, shows us that the traffic rank of MySpace has dipped over the past two months. Over this same two month period, Facebook has grown considerably. To be completely honest, i’m a little surprised with these figures. I definitely thought that Facebook would have had a bigger lead on MySpace.

Step Two - The Member Test

This next step isn’t really a fair test but I thought I would throw it in to add a new dimension into the mix.

An interesting sociology study was posted on Mashable about one year ago now addressing the difference between Facebook and MySpace users. According to the study ‘jocks’, ‘athletes’ and ‘goodie two shoes’ are the types that frequent Facebook whereas MySpace is the hang out for the ‘alternative’ crowd, ‘punks’, ‘emos’ and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm!

Based on the vast differences between the member bases of these sites, I am starting to feel a little guilty for comparing the two. Apples with oranges?

After completely digressing from my first questions in this post, I want to go back to my original question on the longevity of these online sites. And are we or are we not over-valuing them?

LinkedIn recently valued itself at $1 billion. Similarly, according to Computerworld, Facebook received a market valuation of around US$15 billion after Microsoft bought 1.6% of the site for US$240 million last year. Other networking sites have had valuations between US$200 million and US$560 million, based on transactions from this year. In the same vain, Facebook received a market valuation of approximately “…US$15 billion after Microsoft bought 1.6% of the site for US$240 million last year…”

I’ll leave this one with you to ponder on. Will this bubble burst?

Many facebook application developers have been asking whether they should develop for international markets now or wait for Facebook to release its crowd-sourced translation tools for applications. New data is available on applications developed in other languages.

In total, there are 527 apps currently listing a language other than English as their primary language. That’s about 1.7% of the 30,000 Facebook apps currently in the directory. The most popular apps in languages other than English are Sexo Quizz (French), with 25,000 daily active users, Horoscope (French), with 18,000 daily active users, and Tarot Gratis (Spanish), with 13,000 daily active users.

Spanish is by far the language with the most apps developed at 330. Next comes French at 134. Trailing far behind are German (11), Italian (9), Japanese (7), Danish (6), and Finnish (6). Less than 5 apps have been developed in Chinese, Catalan, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, and Korean. Developers keeping track of Facebook’s user counts in international markets will note that there remain tremendous opportunities for local developers in languages with huge user populations on Facebook.

And as a final note, in addition to adding a language filter to the application directory, Facebook also removed application counts from the directory. Now, you’ll need a third party service to count.

Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with “Friend Connect” on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of “APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.”   Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data. Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming Yahoo Open Strategy. Source: News.com