Social Gaming Network, a company I’ve written about countless times on this blog (and interviewed the CEO), just received $15 million in funding according to Caroline McCarthy. The Series A comes from Greylock Partners, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Columbia Partners and D.C. based Novak Biddle Venture Partners.

Social Gaming Network is the third largest company on Facebook based on installs, according to Adonomics.com. It has half as many active users as the company’s rival, Zynga Game Network. While Social Gaming Network has a declining base of active users, it isn’t too late to turn that trend around. Given the new round, it looks like the investors agree with that sentiment.

$15 Million is a large amount for a Series A in this space. I’d expect the company to begin making more acquisitions to add to their portfolio. Social gaming is still extremely early stage and has only a few key players. I’d expect this space to explode alongside the social dating space which also appears to be booming on Facebook and Myspace.

While Zynga is currently dominating the gaming space on Myspace, look for SGN to start making aggressive plays to bolster their position. Given the early stage of this space it is still anyone’s game. Social Gaming network has solidified their dominant position with this new round of funding.

MySpace is announcing breaking news in 17 minutes. Peter Kafka speculates that this is pertaining to MySpace’s decision to embrace data portability. I will be updating this post with more information as soon as I hear more details from the call. I’m now on the conference call and waiting for it to start. I will be posting live with call details.

Peter Kafka has just posted the press release prior to the call. According to the press release “MySpace, the world’s most popular social network, alongside Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, today announced the launch of the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, a ground-breaking offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile data to websites of their choice throughout the Internet. Today’s announcement throws open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and Web identity. The launch of the Data Availability initiative marks the first time that a social Website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.”

According to the press release, users will be able to update all of their profile information from one central location. This is a huge announcement and appears to be an alliance which does not currently include Facebook as an active participant. The system enables MySpace users to share profile information with other sites that they visit.

Mike Arrington is also providing more details prior to the call. According to Arrington, “data sharing is dynamic, meaning it is updated constantly.”

I’m now on the call. Chris DeWolf is first up on the call. Today they are announcing “MySpace data availability” which enables users to share their Myspace profile data content to other sites on the web. Chris is giving a historical backing about how social networks were never able to have data across platforms. Data will be shared across all other sites. Myspace wants your profile on Myspace to be your social address.

Amit Kapur is now reading through a lot more information which appears to be right of the press release. He is emphasizing that the new service is opt-in and is centered around Myspace. Myspace videos, friend network, photos and profile information will be shared and there will be a centralized location on the site that users can use to select which information is available to other websites.

Next up on the call is Jim Benedetto. He is talking about the technical implementations. There will be REST APIs that other services can integrate with. Myspace will also launch granular controls to privacy. As soon as this system launches it will be available to all websites across the internet. Jim is going through a deeper explanation of how this happens.

Caroline McCarthy has asked if OpenID is going to be part of this system. Jim’s response is that they will be using OAuth from the beginning and may potentially use OpenID in the future.

In response to the next question Amit Kapur is stating that this will be launched on a global basis and it is being launched immediately.

The next question is if MySpace is working with the Data Portability project on this. The response is that they are working with the Data Portability project with this and the first step is the “Data Availability” project.

The next question is when will this launch? The response is “the next few weeks.”

Saul Hansell asks if they can go into more detail on the terms. Jim says from the terms of service perspective is that Myspace needs to have strong control of the data caching on other websites. Other sites are not allowed to store or cache any data that is being provided to other websites.

Next question up is when will they be working with Facebook? Myspace says they are happy to work with Facebook or any other site on this project.

The call is finished. This is huge news and makes Myspace a central player in the data portability movement. I will be writing further analysis later in the day on this but for now this is a really big announcement and has just changed the face of the social web. This may be considered just as large of an announcement as the Facebook platform just under one year ago.

The concept of a centralized location to modify all of our personal information across the web is truly ground breaking. Looks like Myspace is officially back in the game. This also has the potential to counteract the whole social application movement and bring applications outside of the social network sites. Remember that concept of social networks as thin as air that Charlene Li previously talked about? This is the beginning of just that.

Yesterday, News Corp. reported their earnings for Fox Interactive Media group which is mostly represented by MySpace. Earnings dropped around 10 percent quarter over quarter. Alley Insider has paraphrased News Corp. COO Peter Chernin on the earnings call:

We remain incredibly optimistic about social media. But there are specific challenges 1) Tons of inventory. Lack of scarcity creates a liquidity challenge. Working on bringing big brands aboard. 2) People who are visiting social networks there for different reasons, different uses. Figuring out how to target. 3) What’s the value of a “friend”? Trying to figure out new metrics to communicate with marketers.

The first issue that is brought up is something that Naval Ravikant expressed on last week’s podcast: there is nearly unlimited inventory. This is creating a serious problem which is resulting in the continued decrease in CPMs. While AppsSavvy, a New York based social network advertising company has seen average CPMs between $8 and $12, most developers have not been seeing anywhere near this.

Excess inventory and varied traffic is making it extremely difficult for these sites to monetize. Whoever comes up with an effective scalable model for social network monetization will have a fortune. There were some highlights from FIM’s report:

• 54 percent percent of all social network ad revenue is going to MySpace
• Revenues were up 24 percent year over year
• Times spent on MySpace video continues to increase
• “MySpace is at an all time high in terms of audience reach and engagement according to both comScore and Neilsen — more than doubling Facebook’s U.S. audience with 73 million users compared to Facebook’s 36 million.”

So while MySpace did not produce the most impressive quarter, the site continues to grow even despite Facebook’s continued growth.

Yesterday Classmates.com announced a record quarter with the addition of 322,000 paid accounts. The company recorded earnings of $51.9 million (comparable to quarterly earnings of Facebook) and a total of 50 million registered members. I wasn’t aware that their site was still growing and I’ve never thoroughly explored their site but they have some pretty impressive numbers.

Conversely, when comparing Facebook’s revenue to Classmates.com’s revenues, it appears that advertising has been an equally effective model to Classmates.com’s pay for service model. While Classmates.com is not seeing the astronomical growth that Facebook is (who adds over 250,000 new accounts a day), they are still growing and this emphasizes how there is still room for large social networking sites targeting the same space.

I don’t have information about Classmates.com demographics but I would guess that it is comprised of older generations that are looking to connect with the people they went to high school with. The younger generations are growing up on MySpace and Facebook and are not in need of such services since they maintain contact with others for an entire lifetime.

Are you on Classmates.com or know anybody that is? Would you pay for a social networking site?

Pingdom has released their social network downtime report and Twitter ranks atop the list. On a month by month basis though Twitter has been improving their overall uptime. On average Twitter is up 98.72 percent of the time. So if you are noticing all of the downtime by Twitter you are using the service a little too much!

Bebo has also recovered from the substantial downtime they were experiencing when their platform first launched. The social network with the least downtime was MySpace. This is impressive for a site that was once defined by the substantial amount of downtime it experienced on an almost daily basis. While most websites suffer downtime, social networks typically get the most buzz about downtime because of the substantial amount of traffic.

Overall there wasn’t much surprising data in the report. 99.9 percent uptime has become an industry standard for hosting providers and internet users have come to expect maximum uptime from all the services they are subscribed to. One thing to note is the impressive showing from Facebook considering the continued exponential growth that the site has experienced over the past couple months.

Dunbar’s number, “is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.” While no precise number has been proposed, the average number cited is 150.

Rapleaf recently embarked on the largest social networking study ever and sampled over 30 million people across various social networks including Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, Flickr and others. The results? Here are a few key statistics:

• 80 percent of members surveyed had between 1 and 100 friends
• Another 19 percent had between 100 and 1000 friends
• People with over 1,000 friends accounted for 0.68 percent of the sample set.

The data was definitely skewed as approximately 21.6 percent only had 1 friend. This isn’t a measure of human behavior in general but instead human behavior on social networks in general. This means 21.6 of users tend to create an account and never come back. Additionally, spammers could make up a large portion if Myspace in particular was weighted move heavily since every user on Mysace has Tom as a friend at a minimum.

So is this news? Not really but I’m sure that Rapleaf made a substantial investment in generating these statistics. What I found interesting about this report is that even in the online world, users tend to be constrained to the number of relationships that they are able to maintain. One thing that is not displayed is how these numbers differed between ages.

Many younger people that I know in college tend to collect friends on Facebook as though it’s nothing special. Maintaining those relationships is a whole other story. Personally, I have found that as you increase the number of contacts you have, you end up with the classic email overload problem. It would appear that this problem may be limited to simply those that are highly connected.

Unfortunately I don’t know the distribution among people between 100 and 1,000 friends so I can’t come up with an approximation of people that have more than 150 contacts. My guess is that this group is no more than 10 percent of the population. For that 10 percent though, email and other communication channels have become overwhelming and developing a solution to that is critical.

How many contacts do you have on your various social networks? Have any of the current technologies made it easier for you to maintain relationships with more people?

Xiaonei, the Chinese clone of Facebook, has raised a whopping $430 million, beating out Facebook in the size of their financing rounds. No word on the valuation at this point but the move was clearly aimed at making a statement about Xionei’s dominance in China prior to an entry by Facebook. Considering that MySpace was the first exit in this space at an acquisition price of $570 million, $430 million just for a round of funding seems pretty ridiculous.

This could potentially be the largest round of funding for a social networking site to date. Alexa data ranks the site as the 370th most popular site on the web. I’m not sure if this data is completely accurate but no matter what their traffic is, the company is cash flow positive according to an interview which Matt Marshall had with one of early investors, David Chao.

Matt also questioned David Chao about the design of the site and how it resembles Facebook. David said that he thinks the site actually resembles IBM and mentioned that many sites use various shades of blue nowadays. While it’s clear that the site is a direct ripoff of Facebook, it also appears that the investors could care less. Given that China now has the largest online population, Xiaonei is poised to potentially become one of the largest social networking sites on the web.

Last night MySpace launched a Karaoke feature for their site. I took a look and it’s pretty slick. Mike Arrington was highly critical of the service following a delayed launch of the service. I honestly think this as a really big potential. Considering that Fox is also the host of American Idol, I could foresee a potential integration.

Then again, most people don’t have high quality microphones, making karaoke fall slightly short of an in person audition to be on the show. One thing that would be a nice addition is some sort of multi-player with video. In the meantime it’s a pretty fun way to waste sometime especially if nobody else is around. If you want to bring in more people it’s a little more challenging but still possible.

I tried it out myself and I have to say it was pretty embarrassing to see myself sitting in front of a computer singing. One thing is for sure: I’m not going to be on American Idol anytime soon. Conversely, I’ll take anybody on if you think you can sing better than me Just post a comment with the song below and I’m sure I can record a better version. Perhaps this is the beginning of online karaoke face-offs!

Would you play karaoke online? So far there are some decent singers on the site but there also aren’t many people playing as of yet. Go check out MySpace karaoke and let me know if you want to challenge me!

Last night at precisely 11:30 PM EST, some computer was triggered somewhere in the world that began bombarding my site with spam emails. Within 30 minutes I had received over 3,000 spam emails. I was able to devise a system to block the spam but the bottom line is that spam is a serious problem for many of us, especially if you are a MySpace user.

When was the last time you received a friend invite from an attractive lady friend who really just wanted you to check out her cam site? It happens to all of us that are on the site and it was one of the primary reasons that many users ended up leaving the site. Well, according to News.com, one of the spammers, Sanford Wallace was ordered to turn over documents to the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California and failed to do so.

So it appears that the judgment against Wallace is simply a statement but there has been no monetary judgment as of yet. Wallace is never far from the hot seat though as he lost a number of previous suits and in one instance was “ordered by a federal court to turn over $4,089,500.” From the sounds of things it appears that Wallace is still running from the law. I’m not quite sure how Wallace is making his money but if my MySpace friend requests are any indication, he was probably selling memberships to webcam sites.

Aside from that, I’m not quite sure how some of these spammers generate money especially when they decide to bombard inboxes with thousands of messages in a relatively short span of time. While the fight against spam is nowhere near finished, this is one loss for the spammers. Unfortunately, there is no telling whether this will have any impact on future spam prevalence on the most popular social networking site on the web.

Mario Sundar, the community evangelist for LinkedIn, has posted a chart of Nielsen’s March ratings which shows LinkedIn surpassing Facebook in growth. According to Nielsen, LinkedIn grew a whopping 319 percent since last year. This is in comparison to Facebook which grew almost 100 percent.

Percentages can be misleading though and these numbers also can be highly inaccurate as show with Google’s recent quarter and Comscore’s blunder. The report shows that Facebook only had approximately 25 million users in March, whereas Compete.com says Facebook had 31 million unique viewers the same month. No matter what numbers you look at though, LinkedIn is experiencing phenomenal growth.

This could be a direct result of the growth of social networking sites into demographics that traditionally stay away from social networking. As I wrote about this morning, the Boomer generation has an increasing number of people on social networks. Users over 45 now account for a whopping 31 percent of LinkedIn’s user base. Which demographic is experiencing the most growth though is currently an unknown.

Whatever the case, social networking is still booming and LinkedIn has proven its ability to experience continued growth even in the face of Facebook where business networking in now pervasive. Perhaps not all social networks need their own platform!