It seems that everyone is excited about social networks. But not quite in the same way as Harvard graduate student Erez Lieberman, whose evolutionary graph theory is encouraging people to think about social networks in a different way: as an evolving population.

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In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean.

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A small new survey from Nielsen about the five fastest growing “member community destinations” in the U.S. reveals what we all kind of knew already: Twitter is at the top. From February 2008 to February 2009, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382 percent growth rate. That’s to be expected, considering the amount of press the still-without-a-business-model microblogging service has gotten in recent months.

In third place is Facebook, with 228 percent growth year-over-year according to Nielsen. That’s not terribly surprising, as Facebook is still growing in the U.S. but not quite as exponentially as it once was.

There are, beyond that, a handful of interesting things to note. Two of Nielsen’s top five, for example, aren’t social networks but rather wiki creation services: Zimbio (240 percent growth) and Wikia (172 percent growth). And in fourth place is Multiply, which probably got a surge of activity when it recently acquired the MSN Groups service that Microsoft (MSFT) was spinning off.

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Advertising-spending growth on social networks is going to take a major hit amid the recession and the sites’ continued struggle to develop effective ad models, according to a new report from research firm eMarketer.

The firm plans to release on Wednesday its revised projections for global ad spending on social networks. It forecasts an increase this year of 17 percent, to an estimated $2.3 billion. While any growth in the otherwise dismal ad market is a bright spot, the projection is just over half the 32 percent growth rate the research firm previously projected. In the U.S., ad spending on social networks is expected to increase 10.2 percent, reaching $1.3 billion this year.

Rivals Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, the two largest social-networking sites by visitors, continue to dominate. The two companies will account for two-thirds of total U.S. social-network ad spending and will hold a smaller share outside the U.S., attracting 40 percent of world-wide spending in 2009, eMarketer says.

Note: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.

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No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.

There are now at least 1.6 billion of us connected via computer and three billion mobile devices that touch the Internet. The rise of “social” technologies–such as wikis, blogs, Twitter, SMS and social networks–means that the barriers to participation across the planet (in terms of the cost, access and skills required) are rapidly approaching zero.

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That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other tidbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming.” In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerization certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom–and why–demands quite a bit of mental computation.

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I recently discussed the viability of Twitter evolving beyond a micro community into a standardized platform for macro conversations. It’s certainly the path Facebook is traversing. And, both are making significant progress in the race to syndicate and aggregate the discussions that are important to us within our respective social networks.

There is another emerging platform worth discussing as it is quietly growing into an alternative solution to the disparate communities that are pervasive throughout the social Web.

Ladies and gentlemen, add FriendFeed to your radar for listening, participation, and relationship building.

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Rather than wasting their time, children who gab on Facebook or play online games are gaining valuable social skills and learning some technology basics, according to a study to be released today.
The report, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, contradicts the idea held by many educators, parents and policymakers that children should be blocked from online social networks and videogames like Halo, which allow users in different locations to play together. Instead, children should be encouraged to use the technologies to gain a certain level of digital literacy, the study said.

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Social networks are front and center in the latest redesign of AOL’s AOL.com homepage, which the company announced Thursday and says it will start to gradually roll out to users over the next few weeks (unless they choose to opt in earlier).

A widget (or module, or gadget, or whatever you want to call it) on the new AOL.com features a tabbed interface with updates from five different social-networking and messaging services: AOL’s own AIM and Bebo, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook. Called “My Networks,” the tabs invite members to log into their social profiles and see a limited amount of information–feed and in-box updates from Facebook and MySpace, new Twitter messages, AIM status messages, etc.–as well as links to access the full versions of the apps.

The Facebook credentials, for example, come from the social network’s new Facebook Connect service, an extension of its developer API.

These are just the launch partners, AOL executive James Clark told CNET News last week, and more social-networking and messaging services will be added to the lineup over time. “(It’s) part of a consistent evolution of opening up,” Clark explained, pointing to AOL’s addition last month of outside email service alerts to AOL.com.

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Could Twitter become terrorists’ newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.

For years, American analysts have been concerned that militants would take advantage of commercial hardware and software to help plan and carry out their strikes. Everything from online games to remote-controlled toys to social network sites to garage door openers has been fingered as possible tools for mayhem.

This recent presentation–put together on the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and found on the Federation of the American Scientists Web site–focuses on some of the newer applications for mobile phones: digital maps, GPS locators, photo swappers, and Twitter mashups of it all.

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How worried are you about the amount of private and personal stuff you have posted on social-networking sites? I’ve always been pretty relaxed–both because I’m very careful about how much information I give away, and because I think I know my way around privacy settings.

But an investigation by my colleagues at Click has made me think again. They set out to explore just how much data is accessible to developers who make applications for Facebook. What they found was that it was relatively simple to write an application that would give the developer access to lots of personal data–not just from those who’ve installed that application, but also from their list of Facebook friends.

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OK, the title may be a slight exaggeration, but the data from a new study by the social-contact search site Rapleaf is nonetheless interesting.

In what they claim is the largest social-network study ever done, Rapleaf looked at the social connections of both men and women. All told, they collected data from over 30 million people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Hi5 and others.

Interestingly, when you focus on users with fewer connections (well, relatively speaking–we’re talking about one group of people with between 1 and 100 connections, and another with between 100 and 1,000), women tend to have more friends than men. However, when you get to a really large number of connections (1,000 to 10,000, and also 10,000-plus), men have more friends.

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Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are often just one click of a bookmark away on users’ Web browsers. Google looks to be one-upping them by turning its personalized home page, iGoogle, into a social network of sorts. With the new developer sandbox for iGoogle, Google is offering hints of what could be a very grand scheme. The video Google has released is front-loaded with what seem to be routine updates for what developers can do with iGoogle. However, toward the end we’re hit with code for accessing friends’ data and yes, creating an all important (in this day and age of social networks), friends’ activity stream.

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With diesel prices in the U.S. hovering at just under $4/gallon nationally–up over a dollar from last year–independent truckers especially are starting to feel pain at the pump as operating costs are driven higher and higher. One idea to combat the all-time high fuel prices that’s apparently being kicked around inside the trucking community is a protest strike. As we’re seeing with a growing number of social movements, the organization of this idea seems to be coming together through online channels like social networks and forums.

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The young are learning to multitask at an early age thanks to the TV. A study conducted by Grunwald Associates on kids’ use of social networks found that 64% of people between the ages of 9 and 17 aren’t just glued to the couch while the TV is on–they’re going online at the same time. In fact, the TV is what’s driving them to go online while watching their favorite shows, sometimes by offering interactive activities to go along with what they’re watching.

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