Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for $580 million, hoping to parlay that investment into billions.

Why? Because unlike most of his digital-dunce mogul brethen, he somehow managed to buy MySpace for only $580 million!

This coup was cited again and again as evidence that Rupert Murdoch had something that no other mainstream media mogul (excepting possibly Barry Diller) had: Brains enough not to get taken to the cleaners when it came to buying Internet properties.

Last summer, the brilliant digital Rupert even emerged as a potential white-knight in the Microsoft-Yahoo struggle: He would merge MySpace into Yahoo and save Yahoo from Microsoft’s clutches…as long as Yahoo agreed to value MySpace at something like $10 billion.

Even Yahoo wasn’t that stupid.

Rupert’s real goal in that effort, it seems, was to unload MySpace before its value completely collapsed. Which, arguably, it has since done.

Click here for the Business Insider story.

“We leave the door open for advertising,” co-founder Biz Stone wrote on a company Web site Thursday. “We’d like to keep our options open.”

Closely-held Twitter, which enables users to spontaneously post 140-character messages online, has seen its audience grow rapidly. However, the company’s management has made clear that it intends to move cautiously when it comes to related money-making opportunities.

According the published terms of service, Twitter has reserved the right to serve up advertising related to its users’ published short messages, or “tweets.”

“Twitter and its third party providers and partners may place such advertising … in connection with the display of content or information from the services whether submitted by you or others,” the new terms read.

Click here for the MarketWatch story.

Facebook can be a great tool, and an occasional annoyance. What kind of Facebooker are you?

There are lots of fun, interesting people you’re happy to talk to when they stroll up. Then there are the other people, the ones who make you cringe when you see them coming. This article is about those people.

Sure, Facebook can be a great tool for keeping up with folks who are important to you. Take the status update, the 160-character message that users post in response to the question, “What’s on your mind?” An artful, witty or newsy status update is a pleasure — a real-time, tiny window into a friend’s life.

But far more posts read like navel-gazing diary entries, or worse, spam. A recent study categorized 40 percent of Twitter tweets as “pointless babble,” and it wouldn’t be surprising if updates on Facebook, still a fast-growing social network, break down in a similar way. Take a CNN quiz: What kind of Facebooker are you? »

Combine dull status updates with shameless self-promoters, “friend-padders” and that friend of a friend who sends you quizzes every day, and Facebook becomes a daily reminder of why some people can get on your nerves. Watch as Facebookers reveal bugbears »

Click here to read about 12 of the most annoying types of Facebook users at CNN.com.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter

Co-founder Biz Stone tells VentureBeat the company is in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics. After that, the company might move into building business-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs), creating a “commercial layer” over the social network. The commercial APIs would be out “later this year,” he said.

“Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it,” said Stone in an interview. “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

The company has already moved in this direction by releasing a guide for professional users, detailing how companies can use it to find customers, pass on deals and perform market research. It is also going to offer “certified accounts,” for businesses, for example letting JetBlue certify that its Twitter account is owned by JetBlue and not by someone pretending to be JetBlue (until now, Twitter has done this only for a limited number of people, including celebrities). Stone didn’t give a specific date for when the company would launch the newer commercial offerings.

Also, it might be hard to tease out who is using the service professionally and who is using it for personal reasons, and then charge them for it. So the idea is to build a set of features that people are willing to pay for.

“We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know — ‘How am I doing on Twitter?’” he said.

Click here for the VentureBeat story.

Nearly half of executives have some degree or discomfort being friended by the employees they manage or their bosses, according to a survey released Thursday by OfficeTeam.

It’s the latest sign that many business people are approaching Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks with caution.

The OfficeTeam survey was based on telephone interviews with randomly selected senior executives at the nation’s 1,000 largest companies.

Executives were asked, “How comfortable would you feel about being ‘friended’ by the following individuals on Facebook?” The list included the boss, office subordinates, clients and vendors.

Thirty-two percent chose the strongest category out of five comfort levels and were “not comfortable at all” being friended by their boss, while 33 percent were “not comfortable at all” being friended by people they manage, and the same number felt the same way about clients.

Thirty-eight percent were “not comfortable at all” being friended by vendors.

Click here for the Denver Business Journal story.

This marks a striking shift. Companies were initially hesitant to advertise on social networks because users appeared resistant to advertising and there were fears that corporate logos might appear alongside offensive content.

However, Facebook, which has 340 million unique monthly visitors, says 83 of the top 100 advertising spenders in the U.S., as ranked by the research group AdAge, use its site. This group includes Johnson & Johnson, Nike and AT&T.

“Every client wants to talk about Facebook,” said Ed Montes, U.S. managing director of Havas Digital, whose clients include Sears, Expedia and Air France. “I haven’t seen this kind of consistent fervor for a company since Google.”

Click here for the Financial Times story.