A recent Reuters article discusses the phenomenal growth of the MySpace social networking web site, which is now ranked in the No. 1 spot among all U.S. web sites, topping even Yahoo! and Google.

From the article –

Online teen hangout MySpace.com ranked as the No. 1 U.S. Web site last week, displacing Yahoo Inc.’s top-rated e-mail gateway and Google Inc.’s search site, Internet tracking firm Hitwise said on Tuesday.

News Corp.’s MySpace accounted for 4.46 percent of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending July 8, pushing it past Yahoo Mail for the first time and outpacing the home pages for Yahoo, Google and Microsoft’s MSN Hotmail.

Hitwise does not provide figures for the number of unique visitors to a site.

MySpace, which dominates social networking on the Web, also gained share in June from other sites that aim to create virtual communities online for sharing music, photos or other interests, Hitwise said.

MySpace captured nearly 80 percent of visits to online social networking sites, up from 76 percent in April. A distant second was FaceBook at 7.6 percent.

You can read the entire article @ MySpace gains top ranking of US Web sites.

NewScientistTech.com is reporting that the Pentagon’s National Security Agency is researching the possibility of mining the the treasure trove of personal information that people are posting on MySpace and other social networking sites for government national security use.

From the article –

“I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.” So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop’s dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

You can read the entire article @ Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites.

According to The Exponent a Purdue student was arrested and charged with intimidation with a deadly weapon after his accuser located his picture on the popular social networking site FaceBook.

From the article –

A Purdue Student was charged with a crime Saturday as a result of the assistance of the Facebook.

Justin Vorbroker, a freshman in the College of Engineering, was charged with intimidation with a deadly weapon as a result of an incident that occured Friday night, said Lt. Mike Boesch of the Purdue Police.

According to police reports, at around 10:30 p.m. Friday Vorbroker and several other students were waiting for a bus in front of McCutcheon Residence Hall. Vorbroker began questioning a woman regarding how many animals were used to make the fur collar on her coat and the woman reported Vorbroker exposed a pocket knife and brought it near her face.

The woman reported the incident to the Purdue Police Saturday afternoon after she used www.facebook.com to identify Vorbroker by a photo, Boesch said. Vorbroker was held in Tippecanoe County Jail until Sunday afternoon on charges of intimidation with a deadly weapon.

You can read the entire article @ Facebook aids in arrest after incident.

A recent article on The Register discusses how Colorado detectives used MySpace profiles to find six rape suspects.

From the article –

Detectives in Colorado have used profiles posted on networking site MySpace to identify six suspects accused of a brutal rape and robbery.

The victim, who has not been named, first met the men through MySpace. They subsequently met for a party.

Detective Ali Bartley told Associated Press: “At some point, the victim was no longer aware of what was happening, and she was sexually assaulted.” Bartley said: “Primarily, we pulled up her friends list. It helped us identify some of the players.”

Six men, aged between 18 and 20, were arrested late last month and one is still being sought. They are being charged with various offences ranging from rape to sexual assualt and robbery.

You can read the entire article @ Police find rape suspects on MySpace.

AllHeadlineNews.com is reporting on five teenage boys who created a fake MySpace profile to cheer up a friend and ended up helping police nab a potential sex offender.

You can read the entire story @ MySpace Helps Nab Potential Sex Offender.

Here is another example of how blogs and social networks like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster and others are being used by school officials and law enforcement as a new form of public record to conduct investigations. According to an article on greenwichtime.com, six teenagers have been arrested for blog postings that police believe were meant to intimidate and tamper with a witness in a drug case.

From the article –

A sixth girl was arrested Wednesday and charged with using the Internet to threaten a student the girls thought would testify against their friend in connection with a marijuana bust on campus.

The threats were made on a Web blog on Jan. 6, a day after the drug arrest, school administrators said.

The 16-year-old Greenwich High School student arrested Wednesday was charged with tampering with a witness by intimidation, a felony, as well as single counts of threatening and second-degree harassment.

Greenwich High School Headmaster Alan Capasso said the threats were made on the Internet journal site Xanga.com.

You can read the entire article @ Blog threat probe nets 6th arrest.

Watch what you do, Big Brother is watching your online social activities and blog. BusinessWeek has published an excellent article that discusses how everyone from scam arists and predators to the police and employers could be monitoring your social networking and blogging activities online. The article also discusses some telling personal horror stories and what social networkers and bloggers can do to protect their privacy.

From the article –

Social networker Shannon Sullivan was getting worried. Like all of her friends, she was spending much of her free time chatting, blogging, and sharing photos on the social-networking site, MySpace.com. But soon, the 14-year-old high school freshman had divulged so much personal information online — from her address and phone number to her birth date and names of friends — that she no longer felt she could surf safely. So Sullivan did the unthinkable: she suspended her MySpace profile.

You can read the entire article @ Big Brother Is Reading Your Blog.

Wired News has published a frequently asked questions sheet for parents who want to know more about the popular social networking site MySpace as well as what they should do if their teenagers have a MySpace account that they are worried about.

You can read the entire article @ A MySpace Cheat Sheet For Parents.

Purdue University’s student newspaper The Exponent is reporting that the popular social network site Facebook is being used by campus police as an investigative tool into student activities and behavior. University police officers are being trained on the use and navigation of the Facebook site to aid with investigations.

With the growing popularity of Web 2.o and its many blogs and social network sites like Facebook and MySpace, social web sites and blogs are fast becoming a common tool for law enforcement and legal investigations.

The Smart Mobs blog is the outgrowth of a book by the same name from author Howard Rheingold. Smart Mobs is a great read for skip tracers and investigators who want to keep up on the latest social technology news. The Smart Mobs blog is a great source of information on how wired and networked individuals are creating virtual “smart mobs” that can communicate ideas as fast as modern technology will allow. Subjects discussed on Smart Mobs typically include mass social use of text messaging ( SMS ); blogs; social networks; GPS and RFID tracking technologies as well as related news that will often raise eyebrows.

From the Smart Mobs book and blog –

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing – inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and “swarming” tactics in the “battle of Seattle.” A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages.

The pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven’t joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on Internet auction site eBay is part of it. Research by biologists, sociologists, and economists into the nature of cooperation offer explanatory frameworks. At least one key global business question is part of it – why is the Japanese company DoCoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while US and European mobile telephony operators struggle to avoid failure?

The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people’s telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.

Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy-protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests?

You can read the Smart Mobs blog and subscribe to their RSS news feed @ Smart Mobs Blog