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.

Hearst Corp., the large media organization that owns the San Francisco Chronicle and sundry magazines, said it will acquire Kaboodle, a site that lets people bookmark items they find while surfing the Web, and then recommend and share them with other people.

The price was undisclosed. The start-up focuses on shopping. If someone takes time to research what “sandals” to buy for summer, they can bookmark their results and tag is sandals. Others can then find that research when they too search for “sandals” on Kaboodle or even Google.

While its unclear how well Santa Clara, Calif.’s Kaboodle did in the transaction, the deal suggests new Internet companies will continue to find homes at large companies if they focus on providing a useful service. With the media world so uncertain, and consumers saturated by ads and content, media companies are searching for ways to distinguish themselves. News companies like Forbes are buying Web clipping companies like Clipmarks, phone companies like Nokia are buying photo-sharing companies like Twango, and search engines like Google are buying photo-resolution sites like ImageAmerica.

Kaboodle launched last year and says it has more than 2 million unique monthly visitors, citing Comscore.

Hearst said Kaboodle will help it with its 19 magazine brands in fashion, beauty and consumer technology, including Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping — helping users find products featured in those magazines.

It had raised about $5 million from individual investors (see coverage). This is another story about perseverance. The company’s chief technology officer, Keiron McCammon, had his arm amputated a year ago after hitting a powerline while paragliding, but insisted on sitting in on key meetings to help raise $3.5 million in venture capital.

Chief exec Manish Chandra tells us Kaboodle will continue to operate as an independent site.

Here’s the latest action:

Facebook to be biggest news publisher — Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of social networking site Facebook, suggests Facebook may soon become one of the largest news publishers around — thanks to Facebook’s newsfeed feature, which essentially creates mini articles about members based on their latest activities. He tells the WSJ:

Twenty to 30 snippets of information or stories a day, that’s like 300 million stories a day. It gets to a point where we are publishing more in a day than most other publications have in the history of their whole existence.

China bubble finally here? — For years, folks have been seeing an economic bubble in China, but its economy keeps surging forward. China’s stock markets have coming to life too (large Chinese companies have often preferred foreign exchanges until recently, including in Hong Kong or the U.S). After an eight percent sell-off a few weeks ago sparked a plunge in global stock markets, China’s benchmark Shanghai composite market rebounded to a record high last week. It was the best performing stock market last year, rising 130 percent; it is already up 14 percent this year. (See NYT.)

Google is testing new home page look — Apparently, it will put links at the top of the page, in a pull-down menu, thereby giving you easier access to applications like its spreadsheet and word processor (which are unrelated to search, and so would look odd as links atop its search bar)

For the record, Google is not building a mobile phone — At least, not the hardware, according to a clear statement by a Google executive.

Disney invests in Imbee — Disney’s venture arm, Steamboat Ventures, has invested $2.5 million in Industrious Kid, which owns Imbee, the social networking site built for kids aged between 8 and 14. Industrious Kid has signed a partnership with Disney unit Hollywood Records, so kids can download songs. We reported on Industrious Kid after it raised $6 million in private funding from co-founder Jeannette Symons and others. (See CNET story).

Kaboodle’s CTO loses arm paragliding, but persists — A remarkable story in the SF Chron about Kaboodle’s chief technology officer, Keiron McCammon, who hit a powerline a year ago while paragliding, had his arm amputated, but insisted on sitting in on key meetings to help raise $3.5 million in venture capital.