The biggest social media news trending today is MySpace’s official launch of its self-serve display ad service, announced last November, soft-launched in September and initially targeted at the social media network’s extensive community of musicians in search of ways to make money from their art without necessarily selling their souls to the record labels. 

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and PaidContent’s Rafat Ali both draw parallels to Google, which was just another search engine until it added contextual advertising.

Arrington: "The big social networks are still trying to find their “Google Moment” – the point when (and if) they find a way to monetize these massive audiences they’ve attracted. Google was just a great search engine until they matched it with contextual advertising. MySpace and Facebook need to find their own revenue engine."

Ali: "At a time when the display ad market is slowing down, self serve or otherwise, will this help make up for the shortfall that’s likely to happen this year and next for MySpace? MySpace thinks this is going to add some more incremental millions to its revenues for the year."

The service’s key strength is likely to be its hypertargeting technology, leveraging user information built up over time and based on what each user does on MySpace. So if you’ve been looking for a way to target the 147 women between the ages of 25-30 who live in San Francisco and like motorcycles, now you can.

RSS ads and FriendFeed jump the shark

Staying with the subject of online advertising, Steve Rubel is wondering whether we’re soon to see the end of full text in RSS feeds. We are, after all, in the midst of a global economic crisis and as any fule kno, advertising is one of the first to be hit in a recession. Rubel suspects that many ad-supported bloggers will follow in the footsteps of the larger media outlets and pull their full-text feeds.

Another question on Rubel’s mind at the moment is whether or not FriendFeed has jumped the shark. Scoble thinks people are steering clear of FriendFeed these days because (and I am paraphrasing here) it’s a timesink with diminishing returns of value — and also because we’re burying our heads in the sand when it comes to politics and economic news. But he is not wholly pessimistic, adding: "Those things get better in November. It’ll be interesting to see if the line goes back up then. But we need new features to cure the first thing. I think they are on the way."

Winners break with format to stay relevant

Covering the economic crisis has sorted the wheat from the chaff for Jeff Jarvis, who rounds up his winners and losers in the crisis coverage. Giving props to NPR’s Planet Money and BBC Radio 4′s In Business podcasts, Jarvis reckons cable news has been caught empty-handed: "They just don’t know how to cover a story like this – a story with depth. They know how to repeat over and over that the storm is coming or that the white girl is missing or that the politicians are sniping. But they don’t know how to understand and get us to understand as NPR and BBC4 are doing."

- Basheera Khan