It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.

Most of Facebook’s user growth, however, has been in international markets - MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques. Facebook has 36 million monthly uniques, up from 23 million a year ago.

Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period - at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.

There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on that next week.

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Hi5, the third largest social networking site in the world,  has recently laid off almost 15 percent of its employees, a move to cut expenses in this gloomy economic condition where industries from all sectors including the Internet field have been experiencing dramatic financial slow down.

According to a high ranking official of the company, this move is an attempt to cut expenses in order to survive in this global economic crisis which had caused even the proud Wall Street to stumble upon its feet.

According to the latest figure, the company has also experienced low rates of unique visitors which had also forced some major sponsors to pull out their commercials and other kinds of advertisement posted in the webpage.

The reason for the financial throes experienced by most social network sites is the low advertising revenue which is just a domino-effect of a weak economic condition.  Since most companies from all sectors are tightening their belt, advertising costs have been greatly reduced to reduce burn rates and limit expenses.

In a statement released by the company’s vice-president in marketing department Mike Trigg, “the move is a pragmatic decision in order to survive in this ever-changing environment, and in order for a business to grow, restructuring should be done in the company.”

Meanwhile a source who asked for anonymity had said that most of the people who had been laid off came from HR and Design department.

According to a recent survey, Hi5 ranks third from the most popular social network sites.  The top placer is Facebook and then closely followed by MySpace, both of which have been considered as the most popular community sites in North America.

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.

Jennifer Porter is a little freaked out.The 17-year-old is hunkered over a sheaf of papers scattered across a spotty Tim Hortons table in Ajax, Ont., one hand flipping pages, the other twirling an oversized blue earring. She brushes an errant lock of sandy blonde hair away from her face, looks up and giggles nervously. “That’s kind of creepy,” she says.

Indeed.

What she’s looking at is quite the biography — everything from her cellphone number, home address and a map to her work (she’s a lifeguard). All of it has been furnished by the man sitting in front of her — a man she’s never met. full story

The leader of a youth movement that swept the world this past year by encouraging Web users to share bits of their lives with selected friends spoke on Wednesday of spreading his service across the Web, even while apologizing for past excesses.

Mark Zuckerberg, 24, told an audience of 1,000 industry executives, software makers, media — and his mother and father — at Facebook’s annual conference of how the company’s features will run on affiliated sites outside its own.

“Facebook Connect” will transform the social network from a private site where activity occurs entirely within a “walled garden” to a Web-wide phenomenon where software makers, with user permission, can tap member data for use on their sites.

“Facebook Connect is our version of Facebook for the rest of the Web,” Zuckerberg told the second annual F8 conference.

Facebook, begun in 2004 as a socializing site for students at Harvard University, has seen its growth zoom to 90 million members from 24 million a little over a year ago, overtaking rival MySpace to become the world’s largest social network.

It has lured 400,000 developers to build programs for it since opening up its site in May 2007. Now Facebook is letting designers build software on affiliated sites, for mobile phones or as services that tap desktop applications like Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail system. It said that in coming months it would let designers building software for Facebook simultaneously create versions for Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iPhone.

“As time goes on, less of this movement is going to be about Facebook and the platform we have created and more about the applications other people have built,” Zuckerberg said. “This year, we are going to push for parity between applications on and off Facebook.”