Hackers are attacking Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites this year more than any other kind, a report Monday said.

Carlsbad-based Breach Security said the number of Web security incidents was up 30 percent in the first half of 2009.

Social networking sites were the target of 19 percent of attacks and media sites second at 16 percent. Three other types of sites were tied with 12 percent each: retail, technology and government/political sites.

That’s a big change from last year’s reports when government networks were the most often attacked and social networks weren’t on the list.

Breach compiles its report by adding up publicly reported attacks, ranging from simple defacement of sites, placing malware on them or using them to spread smear campaigns.

Heads up, Facebook-users: in just a few hours (midnight in your local time zone), you’ll have the chance to choose a user name and corresponding URL for your profile.

The social networking giant hopes the offer will have its nearly-200 million users staying home on a Friday night, boosting traffic and helping Facebook gain a new edge in its mind-share battle with rival Twitter.

As it turns out, the user name gambit isn’t attracting much buzz among most Facebook subscribers, folks who use the social networking site to stay in touch with a close circle of friends and families. But for marketers and other self-promoters, the new program is a chance to turn Facebook into a “branded space” in advertising parlance. (More in a moment on whether this will rankle everyday users of the service.)

Indeed, says Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu, requests from marketers prompted the new offering. “Other services,” he explains, “have a lot of people promoting themselves and we are offering this in case there are people on Facebook who want to do that.”

Take MySpace. In 2005, just before being acquired by News Corporation (NWS, Fortune 500), MySpace moved from assigning numbers to user profiles to giving users branded urls: www.myspace.com/YourName. story source

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.

AOL said Monday that it has closed the $850 million purchase of Bebo and has put Bebo CEO Joanna Shields in charge of the newly acquired social network, AIM and ICQ.

Shields will be in charge of a new AOL unit dubbed “People Networks.” The general theme (Techmeme): Integrate social networking throughout the AOL network and its 80 million users. Shields, who landed at the AOL via the Bebo purchase, will report to AOL president and operating chief Ron Grant.

As part of the move, AOL said it will focus on three areas: The advertising network, publishing and people networks. The goal: Figure out a way to monetizing social networking, a challenge that has befuddled monetization kings like Google.

Among the items on AOL’s social networking to-do list

• Integrate AOL IM, chat and email into Bebo. Users will have common screen names.
• Integrate other AOL acquisitions–Goowy Media and Yedda for instance–into the People Networks unit. AOL will also cross-distribute content on these properties. In short, you’ll see Bebo’s original programming across multiple properties.
• Monetize this social fiesta with open media platforms and content screening.