A new report released from eMarketer today, states that Facebook “will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace”. It’s not a surprising shift considering Facebook’s traffic has been dominating MySpace for over a year now. It appears that advertisers are finally catching up though.

eMarketer’s projections may sound extremely conservative considering that Facebook is expected to generate well over $500 million in revenue this year alone. So what accounts for the $65 million gap in revenue, given that advertising makes up the majority of Facebook’s revenue? The only other significant revenue streams on Facebook would be virtual gifts as well as any testing of Facebook’s new Credits program.

While I think eMarketer’s projections are significantly lower than Facebook’s actual advertising revenues, it highlights Facebook’s ongoing growth. Facebook Pages are increasingly becoming an integral component of brand advertising and that will only increase as Facebook introduces the Open Graph API, enabling branded social experiences to take place anywhere on the web.

eMarketer expects total social network ad spend to grow 7.1 percent next year, up to $1.3 billion, of which Facebook will make up the largest percentage. In other words, there’s a bright future ahead for social networks, as long your company is called Facebook:

Back in September, we saw that 20% of all online advertising was on social networks, with MySpace slightly leading Facebook (9.2% to 8.2%). I suppose we can expect the social share of online advertising to continue to grow—but not MySpace’s.

With Facebook doubling in size this year, it’s not surprising that revenue continues to grow at a rapid pace. It will be interesting to watch Facebook’s growth trends over the coming year both on from the revenue and user perspective.

MySpace and The Wall Street Journal will be sending one MySpace user to the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland as a “Citizen Journalist“.

The “MySpace Citizen Journalist” winner, chosen by a panel of experts, will join the Davos press corps and leverage the MySpace platform to report on conference news and interview world leaders about issues relevant to the global MySpace community. This year MySpace will expand the contestant pool and accept entries from users in the United States and the United Kingdom.

“Recognizing the continued influence of social media, the World Economic Forum has extended a call to action to our online community at MySpace. This year’s theme, ‘Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign, and Rebuild,’ represents the diversity of voices at Davos, and we are thrilled that MySpace users can play such a large part,” said Adrian Monck, Head of Communications of the World Economic Forum.

The “MySpace Citizen Journalist” competition encourages users in the US and the UK to upload a video at “MySpace Journal” explaining why they should be chosen to travel to Davos and represent the global MySpace community as the special correspondent.

A panel of expert judges including Robert Thomson (Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal), Adrian Monck (Managing Director and Head of Communications of the World Economic Forum), Owen Van Natta (CEO of MySpace), Rebekah Brooks (CEO of News International) and Rebecca McQuigg (2009 winner of “MySpace Journal” contest) will select the winner while the MySpace community rates their favorite submissions.

Applicants must explain why they deserve to report from the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos as well as answer one of the below questions:

• Name two issues – one global and one local – in which you’ve been actively engaged over the past year. What have they taught you about your impact in the world?
• Which country caught your attention most this year? What are the primary issues facing its citizens and how would you resolve them?
• What pressing global issue has been underreported? Why is the international community neglecting the topic? How would you draw attention to mobilize support?

“MySpace Citizen Journalist” winner will receive:

• All expenses paid travel to/from Davos, Switzerland
• Invitations to the Young Global Leaders opening conference and various media events
• Attendance at private meetings with editors from The Wall Street Journal and News Corp executives
• The opportunity to document the experience in written and video blogs on MySpace and The Wall Street Journal online
• Syndication of their MySpace blog via WSJ.com

MySpace launches a suite of new API that allow developers to leverage public MySpace data and create innovative applications to socialize content on and off MySpace. Opening up access to publicly available real-time data (such as status updates, music, photos, videos) MySpace reinforces its commitment to powering the real-time social Web and the development of open standards.

Mike Jones, Chief Operating Officer at MySpace, is speaking at LeWeb today to share MySpace’s real-time Web strategy and efforts to empower developers with the new APIs. Based on open standards, the new free-to-use APIs include:

Real-Time Stream API: Allows the full MySpace activity stream to be pushed to third party sites in real-time. The API includes granular filters to control the amount of data seen. Google, GroovyCorp, and OneRiot are among the first to implement this new API.

Status and Mood Commenting API: Enables third party sites to ingest MySpace status and mood updates and allows people to comment from those sites. Comments appear back in the user’s MySpace activity stream, and users can interact with that stream without leaving the third party site.

Open Search API: Allows third party sites to include public MySpace profile information in search results. Users can search for people by name, profile type (e.g., musician, celebrity, comedian) or email address and filter search results by gender, age and location.

Photo Upload API: Makes it easy for users to upload photos to MySpace from third party sites or MySpace Apps. The API enables creation of public or private photo albums.

Updated Version of Post To/Share on MySpace: Facilitates the sharing of content from third party sites with a MySpace user’s friends. When a user posts content from another site, it goes directly to his/her MySpace activity stream, creating a link back to the third party site.

To encourage innovation from developers, MySpace also announced the “MySpace Developer Challenge.” The competition, which kicks off January 4, will award developers who create the most interesting use of the new APIs with cash prizes and promotion on MySpace. Our judging panel will include Mike Jones – MySpace Chief Operating Officer, Ron Conway – Founder and Managing Partner of Angel Investors LP, David Glazer – Engineering Director at Google and Robert Scoble – Renowned blogger and tech evangelist. Winners will be announced at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2010 in San Francisco.

MySpace launches the next phase of the company’s music offering with a wave of new products and tools now available to artists and fans. Today MySpace begins the global rollout of a new comprehensive MySpace Music Video experience, the MySpace Artist Dashboard - a free data and analytics tool for artists globally - and the ability for users to purchase music on iTunes.

The launch of MySpace Music Videos offers fans one of the most comprehensive online collections of music videos available anywhere. MySpace’s Music Video catalogue includes fully licensed music video content from all of the company’s major and independent label partners.

Product functionality of MySpace Music Videos includes:

• New Music Video hub within MySpace Music
• Music Video recommendations based on what your friends are watching
• Browse via A-Z Video search for easy consumption, discovery, and sharing
• New Video player with dynamically targeted “Buy” buttons provided as part of Auditude’s video ad management platform
• Entire artist Music Video catalogues available in artist music players (alongside “Albums” tab)
• iLike now features MySpace’s Music Video catalogue within all partner websites

Also today, MySpace Music introduced the MySpace Artist Dashboard in beta - a free, comprehensive data dashboard for all artists and labels globally which unlocks detailed analytics about their content within the MySpace community. Every global artist with a MySpace profile will have free access to the Artist Dashboard starting today.

Product functionality of the new MySpace Artist Dashboard includes:

• Unlimited access to charts, graphs, and snapshots of MySpace Music data for all global artists
• Data includes fan geography, song plays, profile views, friend count, and profile visitors
• Trending data available for 7 day and 30 day glances
• iLike integration into MySpace Artist Dashboard provides top-level data from iLike’s partner networks
• Artist Dashboard is available in 17 languages in over 20 territories

Additionally, MySpace Music users can now purchase and download music on iTunes in addition to Amazon MP3, and MP3 ringtones via Jamster.

Combo Adds is the first friend-adding website of its kind that offers a free, user-friendly interface to market profiles on multiple social networks at the same time. Users will have access to an effective way to promote profiles, increase views, subscriptions, followers, and friends without spam. The VIP points program entices users to add friends and click links that drive traffic to profiles on some of the most popular social networking sites.

Combo Adds streamlines the MySpace friend-adding process by
allowing users to accrue points while adding one, five, or 25 friends at the same time. MySpace imposes daily adding limits on how many friend requests users can send, but no limit on how many friend requests users can receive. It’s fast and easy to meet the daily quota of friend requests with Combo Adds and even easier to receive incoming requests 24-7. Combo Adds even offers the option to search by interests, gender, age, and applications. By targeting popular apps like Mafia Wars and Fashion Wars players can also quickly build their teams.

Combo Adds helps businesses target customers via social networks and grow their fan base. Filmmakers boost video views, bands increase song plays, products build popularity, and online networkers link to individuals with similar interests. Businesses can capitalize on the social networking movement now more than ever.

Combo Adds hosts profile links driving traffic to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Yuwie, Youtube, Blogspot, Wordpress, Tumblr, Squidoo, Mashable, Orkut, Bebo, LiveJournal, Ning, and more. Combo Adds also hosts monthly contests that feature users on the front page of the site for added traffic.