Twitter’s been making a lot of changes lately. They’ve introduced new technologies like lists — which is kind of like a friend filter on Facebook — and a new way to share one another’s Tweets.

Usage on the company’s website has taken off like a rocket, up 1,703 percent year-over-year in September, and that doesn’t even count people who access the service through text messaging or specialized applications on their smartphones or computers.

But today was perhaps the most radical change of all. Twitter changed its cosmically deep and evocative signature query, “What are you doing?”

Now, Twitter wants to know, “What’s happening?”

No, it’s not an homage to the ’70s TV show by the same name.

Instead, as company co-founder Biz Stone explained in a post on the company’s blog on Thursday, Twitter wanted to re-invoke its vision of a “mobile status update.” And while this all may seem silly to some, Stone wrote that it is an attempt to recognize the larger importance of the Tweeters and their interactions.

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

It probably won’t change Twitter, Stone says, but at the very least it might make the service easier to explain to your parents.

MySpace, the online social network (can we still call it that now that it has ducked out of the Facebook/Twitter competition?), appears to be pursuing what I’ll call the “two-pronged news strategy.” You get used to it when you cover media and technology. For those of you who don’t enjoy this privilege, it goes like this:

• Pick a news outlet that you like and whisper things to them about what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be interesting, it just has to be exclusive. If you’re in public relations, you don’t even have to know that someone in your company is doing this. It works well for you.
• Let the rest of the press read the story and bombard your telephone and e-mail with messages demanding to know if it’s true. Score a big hit on the news cycle. Because you either decline to comment or only want to talk “on background,” it heightens the air of mystery — and newsworthiness.
• The official announcement of the news, which will always resemble 90 percent or more of what you read in the first round of anonymously sourced stories, will get just as much attention as that first round. It’s a 2-for-1 deal that is irresistible to many companies.

I don’t know that MySpace is doing this, and wouldn’t be able to confirm it if I asked. It could just be that the reporters who get the breaking news have great sources and the reporter asked smart questions that would yield good answers. I’ll let you judge.

The first example comes from Kara Swisher, tech blogger at AllThingsD, which is MySpace’s cousin in the News Corp family. She reports:

Microsoft’s MSN is in preliminary talks with MySpace about using the social networking site’s music service, MySpace Music, to help power music offerings on the giant portal. …

Sources said Microsoft execs don’t think they can do as good a job as MySpace is doing and don’t see the point in striking needed but complex deals with music labels, which the News Corp. (NWS) property already has.

MySpace, Swisher adds, would get a “gusher” of traffic. I asked MySpace whether we could talk about this. From spokeswoman: “Off the record I can’t comment.” OK.

The second example is this story in The Telegraph from Monday:

Facebook and MySpace are in talks about sharing content across both sites, according to senior figures at the two companies. The move could potentially see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via its Connect platform, which allows people to log into third party sites using their Facebook ID.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told The Telegraph: “Facebook is focussing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focussing on more a content-led strategy. We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users.

On this one, MySpace CEO and former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta confirmed the talks on the record. But I’m in the position of only being able to refer you to that article.

On the record, MySpace wouldn’t comment. I suspect that the comments will come later when we rewrite the Telegraph’s story along with the rest of the press corps.

If you were miffed at not being able to tweet your innermost thoughts and random musings to your followers yesterday, or post that smartypants comment on a friend’s Facebook status update, blame politics. Turns out the reason why Twitter was knocked down for hours, while Facebook users had trouble logging in and posting to their profiles on Thursday was a Georgian blogger who uses both services.

According to CNET, which cites Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly, the blogger also has accounts in LiveJournal and Google’s Blogger and YouTube platforms, and goes by the name of Cyxymu, which is the name of a town in Georgia. Kelly told CNET:

“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard.”

Now, for those who don’t follow international politics closely, here’s why the pro-Georgian blogger may have been targeted. August 8 marks the first anniversary of the war that broke out between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. Russia sent troops into the separatist region last year, which Georgia claims forced it to launch a counter-offensive. Some other folks say the war started on August 7, 2008. So it was probably no coincidence that the Web attack on Cyxymu, the blogger who blames the attack on Russia, took place on the eve of the war’s anniversary.

Whatever the date, one thing is clear: the more Twitter becomes a communication tool in zones of conflict, the likelier it is to become a target for hackers with political motives. The micro-blogging service obviously needs to step up security so that hack attacks don’t shut it down. After all, regular folks like MC Hammer still need to get to the airport.

Keep an eye on:

• Platinum Equity turns up as the third bidder for The Boston Globe. (The Boston Globe)
• TV dealmaking season wraps up; prices, volume down. (Reuters)
• News Corp’s Fox has asked distributors to withhold DVDs from Redbox. (Bloomberg)

Photo: Georgian national flags/Reuters

No one needs another Facebook or Twitter so any social networking site had better have something new. Serial entrepreneur Vince Broady, who has experience in knowing what people like through his background with games and entertainment, is convinced he has one. It launched this week as thisMoment.com.

Broady’s idea is to let people create what he calls “moments,” which I would call electronic scrapbooks. ThisMoment is designed to work in lots of places — on the thisMoment website, within Facebook (some security issues are still being resolved, he says, but you can use your Facebook ID to sign up), or on an iPhone.

Content can come from anywhere so long as it’s digital: text, YouTube, a video camera, your digital camera, Flickr, Picassa or Facebook. OK, all that might be tough in your old high school scrapbook.

Broady doesn’t exactly mind the word scrapbook (my word, not his), but he thinks that doesn’t really capture what his new product does.

“A scrapbook is solitary and this is collaborative,” he says, because a group of friends can all pour content into a single “moment,” and they can do it from anywhere. “A scrapbook looks backward, but a ‘moment’ can look forward to a trip I’m going to take, not just one I’ve taken,” he said.

In addition to individual moments, Broady has tapped The New York Times, Time Inc , and Hachett Filipacchi Media U.S.’s Road and Track, which are putting together pre-packaged moments of their own. He showed off a New York Times “moment” f Barcelona, which combines pictures, text and restaurant suggestions.

In this tight economy, Broady is funding the project himself and with a little help from his friends — other Silicon Valley denizens who know his work. He has raised $3 million and won’t seek funding from venture capitalists for awhile yet.

Broady envisions the 25-to-45-year-old crowd starting first. But teen-agers could be the first to discover it for dates, parties and trips.

Too bad the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doesn’t charge for its information or make money off its website — they could have made a pile of cash on the swine flu scare. (You know, if it wasn’t a government site.)

Web traffic measurement firm comScore says traffic soared at CDC.gov last month, as people visited the website amid concerns over the H1N1, or swine, flu.

In April, CDC.gov saw a 142 percent increase in traffic, or 5.7 million visitors, making it the top audience gainer among websites, comScore said. “When news of the swine flu pandemic erupted, many Americans turned to the Internet as their primary source of information for how to keep themselves and their families safe,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president at comScore Media Metrix.

Social networks also continued their tear last month, growing 12 percent to nearly 140 million visitors. That’s about three-quarters of the U.S. online population, comScore says, so chances are someone you know is either is Twittering, Facebook-ing or on MySpace. Twitter jumped 83 percent to 17 million visitors, while Facebook grew 10 percent in April from the previous month to reach 67.5 million visitors. MySpace had 71 million visitors.

Keep an eye on:

• Will The Boston Globe’s biggest union balk at the New York Times Co offer? (The Boston Phoenix)
• Web entrepreneurs may no longer need venture capital dollars (The New York Times Bits blog)
• MGM scrambles to restructure its $3.7 billion debt pile (Financial Times)

Photo: Reuters

Facebook is hot, MySpace is not.  We didn’t say it, Yahoo’s new chief executive Carol Bartz did.

During Yahoo’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, one analysts asked Bartz what Yahoo’s strategy is for going after the younger demographic, i.e. the generation whose lives play out on social networks.

“That was one of the questions I asked the (Yahoo) board when I was speaking to them in November and December,” Bartz replied. “I have a 20-year-old and also two kids in their late 20s, so I’m very familiar with the Facebooks of the world and before that, MySpace, and see what the kids do. So I’m very curious about that demographic.”

As for Yahoo’s plans to go after the 15-25 age group, Bartz had two caveats on how aggressively the web company should pursue youngsters:

“They do grow up, and it’s interesting watching the older ones… they’re much more interested in looking at Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News. They don’t have all day to (put up) pictures on Facebook and chat constantly because guess what, they’re off the dole.”

And her second thought:

“The good news is that (this) crowd is very finicky — just as MySpace was extremely hot and then it moved over to Facebook, who knows what’s gonna come next and who knows whether Yahoo can grab that property and be successful.”

Fighting talk.

Photo: Reuters

Is it really giving if the money you’re shelling out for charity isn’t real? The 6- to 14-year-olds that Disney is targeting in a Dec. 12-22 charity drive on its social networking Club Penguin Web site probably would answer an emphatic “Yes!” to that existential poser.

That’s because donating the make-believe coins they earn playing games on Club Penguin to charities like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund – two beneficiaries of past penguin largesse — means less “money” to spend in the snowy virtual world on rugs and armchairs for their igloos, or hairdos and clothes for their penguins. Talk about a painful choice!

Kids who donate will actually be voting on which of three real-world causes to support, and their giving will determine how the New Horizon Foundation, whose principals started Club Penguin, splits up a $1 million donation to charities that represent those causes. During last year’s 10-day campaign, 2.5 million kids ponied up more than 2 billion virtual coins to help other children around the world, New Horizon’s Lane Merrifield said.

This year’s campaign — at the height of a real-world global recession — could show whether Disney’s message that  “It’s a Small World” — the one that sticks in parkgoers’ heads for days — is getting through.

With the fallout from the so-called “Motrin moms” debacle still echoing around the Web, it seems an appropriate time to highlight, once again, the perils of social media marketing. Of course, this is not the first time that a big corporation has managed to arouse the ire of the online masses, and it sure won’t be the last. But the Motrin case is notable for the swiftness and ferocity of the response, not to mention all the angry “tweets.”

In case you missed it, a Web video ad for the painkiller Motrin was cooked up by the folks at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a unit of Johnson & Johnson. The ad was targeted at mothers and talked about the physical pain involved with carrying an infant in a sling. Watch for yourself and see what you think:

It was apparently intended to show empathy for the young mom but the tone was a bit too flip for some. A groundswell campaign on the popular micro-blogging site Twitter took off over the weekend, with thousands joining its ranks, tweeting angrily about the Motrin campaign.

Equally swift was the company’s response, which came on Monday. J&J blanketed the front-page of Motrin.com with an apology, stating - in case anybody missed it - “We have heard you.”

“We are parents ourselves and we take feedback from moms seriously,” the apology said.

With more and more companies turning to social media to market their products, you can expect to see more stumbles from corporate giants. Web ads, blogging, social networks and all the tools afforded by the Web are still uncharted territory for many companies, and many are still struggling to understand how to use them effectively.

MySpace rolled out the public test of its MyAds system, a service created for small businesses that want to run banner advertising on the online social network. Designed to take advantage of the personal information that MySpace members provide, it’s geared primarily toward folks whose businesses are small enough that they don’t have things like media buyers. (See the e-mail conversation with our friend at Bacon Salt at the bottom of this entry for an example of what I mean.)

You can read the Reuters story that we ran Sunday night, and then check out these other stories, which wrote up different angles on the service:

BNET’S Steve O’Hear offers directions so easy that even someone evincing signs of my legendary tech illiteracy could make it work:

1. Sign-up on advertise.myspace.com
2. Create a display ad using the MyAds Builder Tool
3. Select a variable ad spend anywhere from $25 to $10,000
4. HyperTarget to customers (based on self-expressed interests available on MySpace profiles, along with age, sex and geographical location)
5. Measure ad performance with MyAds analytics reporting

O’Hear also notes how the program is similar to Google’s AdWords.

Rachel Metz at the AP offers some related background:

The idea of self-service advertising is not new - Google Inc. has been doing so for years with text-based ads through its AdSense platform. But it has generally been more difficult to combine self-service with display ads. While Yahoo Inc. is trying to merge do-it-yourself tactics with display ads through a new advertising platform, its tools for advertisers won’t be available until next year.

BusinessWeek’s Heather Green sounds warning notes:

Getting some companies to take a chance on social network advertising won’t be easy, especially as the economic slowdown forces many businesses to curtail marketing. “Social networking is still unproven,” says Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research.

And here’s Josh Quittner at Time:

I can’t decide whether this will be a roaring success or a horrible failure. The market MySpace is targeting here - small to medium-sized businesses - is expected to be the hardest hit by the financial crisis in the coming months and years. They’ll have far fewer dollars to spend on marketing and advertising. MyAds is an extremely cheap way to experiment.

I didn’t hear back from the Bacon Salt guys — for whom MyAds has worked quite well so far — until after my story was done. Here’s co-founder Dave Lefkow (by the way, Bacon Salt is, as he notes, a zero-calorie, zero-fat, vegetarian and Kosher seasoning that makes everything taste like bacon):

Q: Why did you use MyAds?

A: We launched the company with a MySpace profile and a Facebook group, and currently use Facebook ads and MySpace MyAds as marketing vehicles. We like that both tools allow us to get the word out to highly connected audiences. MyAds allows for more creativity than anything else we’ve used. Within minutes, we created branded banner ads vs. just text ads. For a very low cost ($500), we doubled our website traffic and increased online sales by 30 percent.

Q: Don’t you think you should win a Nobel Prize for Bacon Salt? (mmmm…. baaacon)

We’re still awaiting word from the prize committee…. Cross your fingers.

(Photo: BLT sandwich at Tony’s on I-75 in Birch Run, Michigan — Reuters)

Barry Diller likes social networks. He says they function as telephones used to: they help us communicate with each other. But one thing they don’t do is make money. Here’s what he told the Goldman Sachs Ninth Annual Internet Conference today in Vegas:

In social networks, the only way you get paid is from advertising and advertising has … on social networks has proved to be not particularly effective.   

That’s not to say things can’t pick up:   

It probably will find ways to be effective but it hasn’t been and so you can’t say okay, lets find widgets and all of these things to put on all of these services.

IAC has invested in widgets and things, with a piece of music sharing application iLike that is one of the most popular on Facebook:        

It’s great. It’s got way more than 10 million … uniques. It’s thriving as a service. It has zero revenue. And it is very much a social network site. … I’m not saying we won’t find ways, but this is very very early days here. So valuations on these kind of entities, I think, are pure speculation. 

 (Photo: Reuters)