VentureBeat

Facebook gained nearly two million new US users from May to June of this year, while MySpace lost about a million, according to the latest data from comScore. MySpace is still nearly twice the size, though, at 72.8 million national users versus Facebook’s 37.4 million. Facebook has, meanwhile, grown 34 percent since June 2007, while MySpace has grown only two percent. A range of smaller, niche social networks — and related social web sites — are also seeing solid growth.

One blog platform, Google’s Blogger, has grown from being slightly larger in the US than Facebook last year, to nearly 45 million users last month; another, Wordpress, has more than doubled its user community to nearly 19 million; another, Six Apart and its various sites, has actually dropped by two percent. Six Apart, however, sold its Live Journal blog service this past year, which likely counterbalanced any growth it has seen on Typepad and other properties.

Meanwhile, Yahoo-owned photo sharing site Flickr has grown 66 percent over the last year to 16 million users — and that’s not the only Yahoo property to stay on the up and up. Yahoo’s new news aggregator, Yahoo Buzz, has passed the nine million user mark since launching less than a year ago. That growth was no doubt driven by users coming from the monster-sized traffic on Yahoo’s homepage that Buzz features are integrated into. It’s clear why Propeller would want to shift gears towards a Yahoo Buzz-style site leveraging its connection with AOL.com.

And, let’s not forget staid old social network Reunion.com, which has doubled from nearly six million users in June, 2007 to nearly twelve million this past June.

There are some smaller sites also seeing notable growth, but comScore won’t let me republish more than just the top ten in table format. So here they are:

Digg has grown from 4.4 million to 6.2 million — meaning Yahoo Buzz has managed to get way bigger, way faster.

Buzznet, a music-sharing site, has grown by around 1.5 million to reach nearly 7 million users. A younger music site, imeem, now has nearly 6.5 million users.

LinkedIn, a business networking site, has grown 141 percent from 1.7 million users to 4.2 million in June. Still not huge, but its users are typically businesspeople with money to spend, so it may be easier to monetize than many of these other sites.

Shopping site Kaboodle has grown 83 percent to slightly more than four million.

And finally, there’s not all bad news for maligned old web conglomerate AOL in the report. Sure, its AOL Hometown site has dropped 34 percent to 5.3 million users, but check this out: Its new AIM instant message profiles have grown from zero to 7.5 million, and its AOL Community site has grown 8,703 percent to 3.6 million users.

Final note: As always, you have to take third-party data analysis with a grain of salt, as each firm’s measurement methodologies may differ from companies’ internal numbers. For example, while comScore reported that Facebook had 123 million worldwide users last May, Facebook itself has more recently claimed only around 80 million.

Here the latest action:

Social network Hi5 publicly launches its developer platform — San Francisco-based Hi5 may be a big opportunity for developers of third-party applications that live on social networks. It is popular in places like Portugal, Thailand and select countries of Latin America. Overall, it’s one of the largest social networks worldwide, with more than 35 million monthly active users — and the company claims that only 25 percent of them also have profiles on other social networks.

Many developers have been excited about MySpace’s developer launch a couple weeks ago, but the company has yet to release a way for users to easily send messages to each other — friend invites and updates from an application — and application growth has yet to happen. One big difference with Hi5, as Mashable points out, is that it specifically lets applications tap into communication channels on the site. These so-called “viral loops” can lead to exploding traffic for applications, as seen on Facebook’s formative platform launched last May. But abusive applications spam users with too many messages — also a problem that Facebook has been dealing with. It remains to be seen how Hi5 will both help applications grow and keep users happy. See our previous coverage of Hi5’s platform here and here.

Facebook does regular old targeted advertising — The social network is working with job site CareerBuilder.com on a non-exclusive ad campaign, where Facebook will run its ads on the side of pages and in news feeds. The specialized recruiting ads will be targeted based on information on a user’s profile, like what their major is in college, according to Reuters. Many had expected to see more such ad targeting done by Facebook itself last year, but it instead introduced Beacon, which automatically tells your friends about the purchases you make on other sites — and proved unpopular with users.

Silicon Valley start-ups are losing their sizzle — The slumping stock market has stalled potential IPOs (initial public offerings) and may slow the creation of new start-ups for the next year or two, the San Jose Mercury News reports. There have been only four IPOs nationwide so far this year and the Nasdaq being down almost 15 percent isn’t likely to create a rush of new ones.

Social news site Buzznet may have acquired music application maker Qloud – The deal went down for a little over Qloud’s last valuation, a source tells Mashable. Backed by former AOL head Steve Case, Qloud has had over 1.8 million Facebook users install its “My Music” application. Meanwhile, Buzznet is rumored to be raising a new round of $25 million, according to PaidContent.

For the first time in 38 years, a new type of memory chip is about to hit the market — A joint venture between Intel and STMicroelectronics called Numonyx has created a new type of memory chip known as phase charge memory (PCM), CNET reports. The chips uses a laser to hit a material, which can melt into two different kinds of crystals. Those crystals serve as the ones and zeroes of digital memory. Interestingly enough, Gordon Moore (the co-founder of Intel and of Moore’s Law fame), predicted such a type of memory in an issue of Electronics magazine in 1970.

Personal shopping recommendation site StyleFeeder has opened its API — Developers will now be able to create third-party applications and widgets centered around StyleFeeder to put on any e-commerce site. Personalized search, bookmarking, item recommendations, watchlists, and customizable images will all be accessible through this API. The Watertown, Massachusetts-based StyleFeeder recently received a $2 million Series A round from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital.

After months of delay, Livescribe finally releases its computer-in-a-pen device — We’ve seen several demos of the cool technology, which allows students to take lecture notes on a special paper. When tracing over those notes later, students can call up an audio recording of the words being spoken as those lines were written. The pen can also be used to do math calculations, translate words, and record conversations. Limited quantities of the pen have begun shipping, according to the company blog (currently down). We previously covered the company last year.

You might think that by now, VCs would use business plans from new social network companies as kindling.

But Hollywood-based Buzznet, a network devoted to allowing indie music fans to bond over the bands they love, has raised $6 million in its second round of funding from Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners. It was valued at more than $20 million, post-investment.

The site is different than music networking sites such as Last.fm . Instead of focusing on online radio, it lets fans post boilerplate social network content like photos, videos, comments and blogs — on a bands’ actual Buzznet profile pages. In some cases, the band members respond. On MySpace, the content on a band’s page is entirely controlled by the band.

Buzznet is aware that it’s not the next MySpace or Facebook, but is taking a different approach, targeting what it calls a “passion group”–in this case indie music junkies–that will generate content itself and keep coming back for more. The company says it hooked over six million active users generating 100-150 million page views per month, a 300 percent increase since the beginning of this year. According to HitWise, in terms of percentage growth, this makes Buzznet the fastest growing social network on the web.

However, looking at the site, we don’t understand why. From the front page on, it’s chaos, with flashing banner ads on the right and shifting photographs on the left. The further down into the site you dig, the more chaotic it becomes. Profile pages are packed with inelegantly placed photos and videos, and a band’s bio is squeezed into a little scrollable text box.

We talked to Buzznet’s Chairman, Tyler Goldman, and he described the site as a “Wikipedia for music,” but with so much visual clutter on every profile page, actually gleaning anything meaningful about a band was a difficult task. Tyler said that the company expects to monetize with advertising, and they did manage to score a deal with Honda for the Honda Civic tour, but that involved creating a totally different site. The company is confident it will succeed where everyone else has failed and convince advertisers to hawk their wares amidst user-generated content. They raised this recent round to build out a top-notch ad sales team to do the job.