My space, your space, who's space Y?!

The latest rumor on the web is that Yahoo is trying to buy Facebook for 1 Billion dollars. If this transaction were to take place, it would be only weeks after YouTube was purchased by Google for 1.65 Billion... And that transaction was made only two weeks after serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban made the comment that "only a moron" would buy YouTube.

On July 18, media conglomerate News Corp. revealed that it's buying Intermix Media, the company that owns MySpace for $580 million. Myspace has about 22 million members.

Just as Microsoft dominates the software and technology market, large internet industries are slowly swallowing up smaller independent competition... Who knows what the future holds. YouTube, Google and almost all viral websites and web based information exchanging sites were all started and operated by a few young people, with an idea and some ambition. Now, those independent forefathers are reaping the benefits of determination.

Do you remember Napster... the concept, not the lawsuit...

Facebook and MySpace are huge web based forums for "keeping in touch" or meeting new people from anywhere around the world. Basically, they are social-networking sites, and the new media conglomerates that are inevitably the world's greatest cash-cows. YouTube and viral based video sharing sites alike are based on a very simple concept... upload your personal videos, with any content you wish, and people around the world will watch. This voyeuristic tendency has spread like wildfire, and all one (creators of YouTube) had to do was establish the outlet.

Now that the outlets are established, the rush to dominate this newfound, largely expanding market has skyrocketed.

Yahoo and Google are establishing (in their own ways) similar "outlets" for user (viral) videos as well as marketable video from networks and commercial industry. AOL has launched AOL Video 2.0, and In2TV which do the same thing, In2TV airs old programming (such as Growing Pains or Godzilla Movies) as well as marketing videos which go as far as political satire to attract attention to their product... and it works because it's fresh, creative and it captures "eyeballs." AOL also gives the viewer the ability to submit their own videos ala YouTube.

It is a rapidly developing world and it's raising many eyebrows; from large corporations’ to the occasional web surfer. The Internet is by far the greatest gift to mankind.

So much for the pony express.

The bottom line is, with this immergence of modern media, and the limitless potential to basically do anything, where do we stop? Where is the ceiling? And how much profit can be squeezed from every orifice of this monster we call the web? Only time will tell, but in the meantime keep your eyes open... if you blink, you'll miss something.