Your location on a friend network, a photo on Facebook, a prayer for a deployed family member on a military-based blog – all posted on the World Wide Web with the intent to bring comfort to loved ones and news to friends. This information may seem harmless, but when put together these puzzle pieces show a picture with more information than military members should share.

Col. Andy Pears, director of Communications and Information for Headquarters Air University, became a “completely fictional” staff sergeant on a social networking site designed for military members to demonstrate the amount of information available. The “sergeant” said he had no trouble creating a profile and false identity.

With a few mouse clicks, Colonel Pears found combat and operations histories, pictures from inside deployed locations, descriptions and duties within that location and details about military members receiving medals. There is never an attempt to confirm military affiliation, he said.

Rodney Rumford was not in the greeting card business when he first explored Facebook. But Rumford, a Net-savvy consultant, hatched a new venture by setting up a business within the world’s second most popular social network.

Since launching Cool Greeting eCards as a Facebook application, Rumford’s applet has had 110,000 installs–not a record but still an impressive start. “I have never seen a way to gather users faster or cheaper,” says Rumford, CEO of Gravitational Media. For launch, his team of 10 workers created 100 new greeting cards, including high-quality audio clips, and now offers more than 150 cards.

The market is ripe for services like that of Networked Insights, which mines data in social networks and discovers how companies’ brands are being talked about by those sites’ users and visitors, according to the company’s CEO and founder Daniel Neely.

The situation is part of an overall trend in which companies are trying to squeeze customer insights out of megasites like MySpace or of their own social network implementations built with “white-label” products, he said.

“In 2008, companies are getting smart about it. … We think we’ve cracked the code on helping you know what’s going on across the social networking landscape,” he said Wednesday.

The Madison, Wisconsin startup announced a set of upgrades on Wednesday to its Customer Insight Platform, which crunches social network data to draw insights into factors ranging from its customers’ brand recognition and reputation — or a competing one’s — to the relative “influence” of a given user.

Sure, some users are completely fed up with receiving friends invites, being “bitten”, “poked” and indeed having sheep thrown at them.

And there has been a 5% slowdown in new UK users to the larger social networks, Facebook and MySpace, between December 2007 and January this year.

But Alex Burmaster, an analyst at Nielsen Online which compiled the figures showing the decline, says: “The slow down in social networks is being somewhat exaggerated. It’s a natural form of any growth that we see in the online eco-system.

50 Cent has more than 1 million friends on MySpace, but if the rapper ever decides to leave the social network, he’ll be leaving behind those friends, too. So like a growing number of artists, he’s started his own social networking site.

On Thisis50.com, fans can create profiles and friend lists just like on MySpace, but 50 Cent has direct access to the site’s users and their e-mail addresses.

More and more acts, from Kylie Minogue to Ludacris to the Pussycat Dolls, are launching their own social networks, which are becoming a sort of next-generation version of artist Web sites.

The social networking component gives fans a reason to hang out on a site and visit more often than they would a standard Web site. And artists can sell advertisements on their sites and offer downloads and merchandise for sale — options they don’t have on MySpace or Facebook. Plus, they own the content and data on how fans use their site, which they don’t get on other social networks.

“The thing that separates Thisis50 from MySpace is we control the e-mail database,” says Chris “Broadway” Romero, director for new media at G-Unit Records, which handles Thisis50. “We can e-mail members if we want to.”

Thisis50 isn’t meant to be a fan club, but rather a platform for 50 Cent to showcase his music and music he likes, and comment on news and user profile pages. Ludacris’ WeMix.com, on the other hand, is more of a hub for aspiring artists to upload their music.

The artist networks aren’t meant to replace MySpace or Facebook, which tend to attract a broader audience and more users.

“(Artists) think about MySpace and Facebook as funnels for their own social networks,” says Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, a company that provides social networking tools for Thisis50, Sara Bareilles and others. “They take and use services where they don’t know the users, don’t have access and don’t have full control, and funnel those fans to something they do control.