Roundup: Geezeo, online ads booming, FaceTunes?, Docstoc invites

Here’s a Friday afternoon roundup of the latest action:

1) Geezeo connects you to personal and financial online services
2) Online advertising worth almost $10 billion in the first half of ’07
3) Rumor: Facebook has iTunes competitor in the works
4) DocStoc private beta invites

Geezeo, an online financial management service, now connected to even more financial institutions — We’ve recently covered Mint, a personal finance site that lets you aggregate your online bank accounts, then analyze things like your overall spending patterns. We’ve also recently covered Cake Financial, which lets you aggregate your stock portfolio from across brokerage firms then compare your performance against other users.

We haven’t covered Geezeo, most directly a competitor to Mint and others, such as Wesabe and Buxfer. Framingham, Mass.-based Geezeo has already let you aggregate and analyze accounts for your credit cards, checkings and savings, loans and other accounts. The company has most recently let you add accounts from over 2,000 brokerage firms, mutual funds and insurance companies, making it possibly the most comprehensive online tool for tracking your personal finances.

Online advertising revenue worth almost $10 billion in first half 2007 — While many wonder if a recession will hit in the next year, and how online businesses may be affected, the good times of the past few years are still showing up on web companies’ financials.

A report by The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers shows online ad revenues set another record in the first half of this year, nearing a total of $10 billion. In Q2, these revenues exceeded $5.1 billion for the first time in a single quarter, a 25.4 percent increase over Q2 2006. The blog WatchMojo calculates that Google alone may be make up 40 percent of this money.

Rumor: Facebook has iTunes competitor in the works — The rumor-monger, the blog AllFacebook, says it has a high-placed, extremely reliable source that says Facebook is hiring people for the effort, and trying to cut distribution deals with record labels. If this is true — and this is a big “if” — the service would throw Facebook into competition against Apple, Amazon and other companies offering online music purchase services.

At first glance, Facebook may also appear to be threatening third-party music applications on Facebook, such as iLike. ILike, far and away the most popular music application on Facebook, is trying to spoil Myspace’s status as a leading online music fan site. It has just released more tools to help artists connect with fans. Last month, the company told us it has more people identifying themselves as fans of bands on iLike’s applications than on Myspace (our coverage). ILike currently directs users to iTunes and Amazon for music purchases.

A Facebook “FaceTunes” (our word, not theirs; our other idea is “TuneBooks”) music service may be compatible with iLike’s challenge of Myspace, where iLike would help funnel music purchasers from its applications to “FaceTunes.” ILike has been careful to develop social services around music rather than developing its own music purchasing service.

Facebook, notably, has taken a dim view of applications that let people share actual music files. One application that did that was Audio, which was subsequently taken offline by Facebook for not following Facebook’s terms of service concerning the sharing of copyrighted music (our coverage).

DocStoc private beta invites — The company (our coverage), which lets users upload and read documents on the web, is offering VentureBeat readers free invites. While other sites, such as Scribd, already offer such a service, DocStoc is focusing on legal, business and educational documents. Adobe’ Share and Microsoft’s Windows Live Workspace are also trying to make it easier for people to upload and share documents. Docstoc chief executive Jason Nazar prepared a video for VentureBeat readers in the video below (RSS readers will have to go to site).