Facebook, YouTube, MySpace era. Cyberspace is the place to be, but often not the place to be seen, for student-athletes.

For the past several years on campuses nationwide, coaches and athletic department personnel collectively have cringed at the thought of what can show up in cyberspace on those sites that demonstrates objectionable behavior by student-athletes.

“It is a hot topic in college athletic departments,” said Christine Susemihl, senior associate athletic director at Colorado State. “Even institutions that several years ago were not touching it find they have to. They at least have to have dialogue with their student-athletes.”

The broad question has become, “How to deal with it?”

Administrators at Florida State and Kentucky have issued ultimatums to their athletes to be careful what they post, according to USA Today, and Loyola University Chicago forbids its athletes to belong.

A sampling of Division I schools along the Front Range shows a variety of approaches toward dealing with such sites, though all say it is an issue they are monitoring.

At the University of Colorado, associate athletic director Ceal Barry believes putting the onus on individual sports to nudge their student-athletes toward responsible behavior is the best course.

“I feel like it’s very difficult to legislate,” said Barry, the school’s former women’s basketball coach. “We don’t have a departmentwide policy … what are you going to do, make (offenders) run laps?”

Instead, Barry said, CU’s student handbook features a section outlining guidelines on cyber activities developed by the student-athlete advisory committee. The belief was, “If it came from their peers, it would be more effective.”

In most instances, it has been. But along the way, there have been slip-ups.

Everything was going fine for the web — the financial world had been unwinding its overleveraged excesses for nearly a year without nary a ripple into Silicon Valley — until the launch of HoffSpace, a social network revolving around the oogachaka-ing, burger-wagging actor.

Some bloggers called it a bizarre nightmare. Others decried it as the end of social networks. They were probably joking. But they were right.

Hoffspace showed once and for all what the web sector had fought so hard to admit: These social networks had finally expanded a niche too far. No longer was it possible to argue that one day social networking sites would be anywhere near as good at making money as they were at expanding, fractal-like, into a grey goo of trivial matter.

Social networks spent too much time trying to build audiences without building a solid business model. The thinking was, let thousands of startups innovate in thousands of ways and one of them will stumble onto something big. The way eBay did with online auctions, or Google did with a better search engine.

But even the site voted most likely to succeed is still punting when it comes to financial success. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a German paper this week that the site won’t have a business model for three years. “Growth is primary, revenue is secondary,” he said. On the face of it, that statement isn’t absurd. But coming last week, it sounded blindly out of touch. Facebook will surely survive, but smaller sites looking to it as a role model probably won’t.

This was the week when the Internet sector realized that not only are the good times over, but that much of the room we had for innovation is also gone. The time to experiment around with big, audacious ideas is passing. The invoice for that luxury is now due, and companies will have to either pay up or be so well-funded, like Facebook, that they can still afford tinker a bit. Money is what everyone is expecting from startups, simply because there is suddenly so much less of it around.

Of course, one thing that would help the sector would be if a major social networking company were to give enough of a peek into its books to show it has healthy cash flows, even a robust operating or net profit. But sites like Facebook and MySpace have been suspiciously shy about their financials so far, so that’s not likely to happen.

Many of these sites — focused on social networks or widgets or other mere embellishments to the web that emerged over the past few years — aren’t going to make it. Some with a smart focus, like LinkedIn, will muddle through. A few will be bought out cheap; others will live on as labors of love.

This is the destructive part of that celebrated and magical creative-destruction formula. A lot of areas in tech are probably going to find ways to keep growing, if more slowly: mobile advertising, perhaps, or cheaper, more efficient on-demand software.

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google’s platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example — the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war according to Duncan Riley.

Even though the battle for social networking supremacy is a fight between Facebook and MySpace, the social networking arms race is really being played out between Facebook and Google. Google has demonstrated the unique ability to bring rival social networks together around its proposed open standard APIs, such as Open Social, FriendConnect, and the Social Graph API. Google has built up its own little iron curtain with MySpace, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Ning, and the Google-owned Orkut to prop up its open source platform initiative. (Don’t bother trying to follow the Cold War analogy all the way through — it doesn’t really work.)

Facebook is now planning to follow Google’s lead and open source their platform. Previously, Facebook’s platform technology only powered an app development platform on one site outside its own — that of rival social networking site, bebo (recently acquired by AOL). An open sourced platform means that any social network could implement Facebook applications. More details should emerge in the next couple of days, according to TechCrunch, who broke the story.

Two questions immediately spring to mind following this news: 1. Does this help users? 2. Do platforms even matter?
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to sit down with Google and work out the privacy issues that caused Facebook to block Google’s Friend Connect last week, he said Monday.

“We want to talk to Google about this and see if there’s a way we can make it work,” said Zuckerberg at a news conference in Tokyo. He was in the Japanese capital to launch the a local-language version of the social networking site.

Google Gets Friendly

Google Friend Connect allows Web site operators to add social networking functions to their Web sites. Users visiting the sites will be able to interact with new people or existing friends from social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut and Plaxo. It’s the possibility of data redistribution to third-party sites by Google that caused Facebook to block access, it said last week.

“Part of the issue with Google’s Friend Connect is that when users grant access to Google’s product, Google might share their information with another application, or some part of it, maybe not all of it, without that user knowing. And part of what makes our system work is that people know exactly who they are sharing all their information with,” he said.

Zuckerberg contradicted Google Engineering Director David Glazer, who said last week in a phone interview with IDG News Service that Google had spoken to Facebook about the service prior to its launch.

“They launched that without asking us or talking to us about it first so we had no choice but to follow the rules that we had set forth for any developer on top of our platform and we followed them,” said Zuckerberg. “But Google’s a big player in the space and they make good things and our goal is to work with them to figure this out.”

Zuckerberg also noted that Facebook has had a similar service, Facebook Connect, available since late 2006.

“We think it’s good that other people are picking up on this trend now,” he said.

International Competition

Facebook faces a tough market in Japan. The number one social networking site, Mixi, has the market virtually sewn up with more than 10 million users, and some doubt whether Facebook’s top selling point, that people use real names, will appeal to Japanese users, many of whom only feel free to express themselves when hiding behind a pseudonym.

Zuckerberg hinted that an update to the company’s site for cell phone users, Facebook Mobile, might be coming for Japan and other advanced mobile markets.

“We have a mobile version of the site and that’s just a first version. We realize that in a lot of more advanced, technical cultures that phones are in many ways more important than the Web but this is just a first approach to that,” he said.

The number of people accessing the Internet via cell phones in Japan outnumbers those accessing the network from personal computers, so a strong mobile site is also important.

Internet company Yahoo said on Sunday that it was considering a “number of value maximising strategic alternatives” and would evaluate any proposal made by Microsoft Corp..Yahoo recently rebuffed a $33 a share takeover offer from Microsoft. Microsoft said earlier on Sunday it has proposed an alternative deal to Yahoo rather than a full acquisition.

In a statement, Yahoo said it had confirmed with Microsoft that it was not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of the company, but it was considering alternatives and remained open to pursuing any deal in the best interest of stockholders.

The board “will evaluate each of our alternatives, including any Microsoft proposal, consistent with its fiduciary duties, with a focus on maximizing stockholder value,” it said.