Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has for the second time put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.

The first one, which we featured in June 2009, already painted a picture of Facebook taking over the world from the West, but the second one shows its relentless colonization even more clearly.

Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however.

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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.

Social network Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook attract millions of users and revenue. Now, a new report says the global phenomena is going mobile, with more than 140 million global subscribers projected to interact via cell phone by 2013.

The report by New York-based ABI Research found that subscription numbers for mobile social networks would climb slowly over the next four years but then ramp up significantly as cell phone technology and user interest embrace the concept. Subscription revenues for the mobile services are projected in excess of $410 million.

Specifically, the report said awareness in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China would be key to the global success or failure of mobile social networking, according to research director Michael Wolf.

“So, we are quite conservative in our forecasts,” Wolf said.

He said mobile versions of social networks would likely follow the business models of MySpace and Facebook by offering free browser-based access. Wolf said such business strategies, however, could pose challenges to mobile operators by limiting their slice of the revenue to a charge for data traffic.

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Location-based mobile social networking is just getting started in the U.S., and there’s a lot of hype surrounding it. But will that hype turn into dollars?Research firm ABI Research predicts the nascent industry will turn into a $3.3 billion market worldwide by 2013. Where will that money come from? Location-based mobile advertising “holds a lot of promise,” notes ABI analyst Dominique Bonte, in a statement. But “the current reality” suggests licensing and subscription revenue-sharing — like Loopt’s recent deal with Verizon Wireless — the most likely near-term revenue streams.

It’s hard to put much weight in pie-in-the-sky predictions like this: It’s one thing to take an existing market and plot out a growth chart. Bit right now the industry is a goose egg, give or take a couple million. We’d hold off before predicting a huge boom.

More interesting to us: Whether today’s location-based mobile social networks — like Loopt, Whrrl, etc. — will be able to outlast more established social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and maybe LinkedIn, once location becomes a feature on those platforms.

When you already have several hundred friends on a social network, it’s a lot easier to add a feature like location than it is to add several hundred friends on a network whose main attraction is location.