The major portals, sensing that the fragmentation of Web content consumption is an irreversible trend, have all moved aggressively into the business of online ad-serving. In fact, AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Google have collectively spent more than $10 billion on such companies this year to help expand their online networks. If you can't beat 'em, you might as well grab a cut of their ad revenue. Instead of spending more money to create stickier content, the Internet majors plan on becoming a one-stop shop for advertisers. The networks they have purchased (with the exception of Google-DoubleClick and AOL-Tacoda) mostly feed …

eBay's failure with respect to its 2005 purchase of Skype is CEO Meg Whitman's fault. Earlier in the week, eBay issued the bookkeeping equivalent of a "mea culpa" by taking a $1.4 billion charge related to its $2.6 billion acquisition of the voice-over Internet protocol provider. Skype, as many predicted, has been a disaster for eBay. It paid way too much for a company with an unproven business model and there are no obvious synergies. "Ms. Whitman should have known better, because Skype became and continues to be a revolutionary technology precisely because it does not extract much …

Sick of all the spam, MySpace users are leaving the News Corp. site in droves and heading for Facebook. The defection may soon become an exodus: August data from comScore shows that Facebook attracted 33 percent more users than July, while MySpace declined 7.4 percent over the same period. Still, Facebook has a long way to go to eclipse Rupert Murdoch's prized online possession: MySpace had 105.7 million users to Facebook's 69.3 million, according to the comScore data. Privacy is one of the main factors behind Facebook's rise. For one thing, the site asks for more personal school and …

Who needs to pay to go to college? Earlier this week, the University of California at Berkeley announced it would make full course lectures available on Google's YouTube. At launch, Berkeley will have over 300 hours of video available through its new YouTube channel. Course lectures include bioengineering, physics, chemistry, peace and conflict studies, and of course, search engines, by nGoogle co-founder Sergey Brin. Berkeley says (the unconfirmed) that it's the first school to make full courses available on YouTube. What's important is that this could become a trend. Perhaps the proliferation of free, advanced college-level information starts …

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion posted strong fiscal second-quarter earnings on Thursday, more than doubling its profits thanks to sales of its BlackBerry handsets. The Canadian company's net profit was $287.7 million, up from $140.2 million last year. Overall revenue also doubled to $1.37 billion, up from $658.5 million, which just surpassed analysts' expectation of $1.37 billion. The Ontario-based company added a whopping 1.45 million BlackBerry subscribers in the second quarter and shipped more than 3 million handsets. Despite results that CEO Jim Balsillie described as exceptionally strong, RIM shares fell $1.02 to $99.52 in after hours trading. RIM's …

Microsoft Corp. is moving into health care. CEO Steve Ballmer described a future where everyone would have a secure and private Web site containing their personal health information, where doctors could post scans, x-rays, test results and visit information. Individuals could then choose to see who has access to view some or all of that information. The new product is called Health Vault. Microsoft's plan is to make each personal Web site as secure as keeping it in a bank, storing all health data and giving users immediate access to those records at any time, via the Web. …

As Facebook continues its rise speculation mounts over its future. Will the 3-year-old social network go public or sell out to one of the Internet majors? Rumor has it that Microsoft, which places ads on Facebook, is set to purchase a 5% stake in the social network, worth between $300 and $500 million. That would indicate a sovereign future for the company, which analysts believe will attempt to go public late next year. Others say an acquisition or two may be on the horizon between now and then. EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson says the company's "may be …

Facebook is growing rapidly. The site is now 43 million strong, and a rash of third-party software programs is making it even stickier. Indeed, third-party development is supposed to be a big part of the company's future, but no one has made that model profitable yet. "Yet" is important, because it's still early days. That said, Facebook's total universe is quite small compared to the billions of people with Web access. That reality seems to be lost in the gold rush that has become Facebook apps. Very few developers report earning tens of thousands of dollars on the …

Count San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joseph Turow, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, as one of those who's freaked out by the idea of a Google-DoubleClick merger being approved. For one thing, the move to acquire the ad serving giant signals the company's (scary) intent to control all media. Google's technology has the power to tell us what we'd like to see, based on the massive amount of information it collects. The search giant also has the power (and intention) to sell that information to advertisers. Turow warns that the DoubleClick merger would be a …

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose company powers advertising for Facebook, told the Times Online (link: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article2573297.ece ) that the social networking site and media darling ran a serious risk of becoming a passing fad. Is that any way to treat a business partner? Maybe Ballmer's comments had something to do with the fact that Facebook shot down Microsoft's advances to offer search on the site, too. However, he could be right. The young company could befall a number of unfortunate fates if it fails to play its hand correctly in the near future. The magazine offers three potential …