Forget about click-through rates or even engagement levels. Facebook wants Madison Avenue to know that the only marketing metric that matters is friendship. "The social-networking site is aggressively pitching to big advertisers like Ford Motor Co. and PepsiCo Inc. the latest in a series of ad formats that tell users which of their Facebook friends have expressed interest in the brand or product featured in the ad," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The so-called social-context ads, which Facebook started rolling out over a year ago, are based on data it collects on the likes and friends of …

Are bloggers giving up on the promise of ad-supported autonomy? Suggesting as much, GigaOm -- which offers its own subscription-based services -- points to a growing number of media pioneers who are scrapping their ad-supported blogs for subscription-based email newsletters. Most recently, Sam Lessin, founder of streaming-media startup Drop.io, said he was shutting down his blog and starting a subscription newsletter. Sensing a trend, Lessin also started his own subscription-newsletter service named Letter.ly. Letter.ly is designed to allow newsletter writers to set their own price for subscriptions, and the Drop.io founder's blog is $1.99 a month. In …

Further positioning itself as a TV alternative, YouTube has launched a new user interface option named "Leanback," with which users can more easily browse content at a distance. "The design has sparked speculation that it is intended to complement the first generation of Google TV devices," writes Computerworld. "The new interface should help YouTube overcome the so-called '10 foot' problem, where interfaces which are highly effective at short distances become unusable with a remote over longer distances." "The world's biggest video site wants to dominate every screen where content can be viewed and …

Having recently been surpassed by Apple (in terms of market capitalization), and still lacking a find a viable mobile strategy, Microsoft is not with without its challenges. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that the tech giant is reportedly preparing to announce a new round of layoffs as early as tomorrow. Still, "The unconfirmed numbers we're hearing are relatively small in the scheme of things -- far less than the thousands of jobs cut by the company last year," reports TechFlash.com. What's more, "The move suggests the company is continuing to keep a tight rein on expenses, and …

Consumers are increasingly logging into third-party Web sites using digital "credentials" from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo. According to Gigya, a provider of tools for social sharing and third-party logins, Facebook is leading the way in areas except for news sites. "Looking at logins across all sites, Facebook is the clear leader," writes ReadWriteWeb. "When we looked at similar statistics from Gigya last January, Facebook led by a factor of nearly two to one over Twitter and Myspace ... Since then, Gigya has added a number of logins, and Facebook now leads by nearly three to one …

Twitter is now supporting 800 million queries a day, company co-founder Biz Stone told attendees of the Aspen Ideas Festival this week. That's 33% more queries than it said it was handling back in mid-April, notes SocialBeat. "That means the company, which is trying to brand itself as an 'information network' rather than a social network, is handling 24 billion queries a month," writes the blog. In April, at Twitter's inaugural Chirp developer conference, the microblogging service said it was supporting 600 million queries a day. "It's hard to compare Twitter's monthly query volume to that of Microsoft's Bing …

Stateside, Facebook's growth actually slowed in June, according to new data from Inside Facebook. The slowdown followed a burst of activity through April and May. Indeed, Facebook picked up only 320,800 new monthly active users in June, compared to the outstanding 7.8 million it gathered in May. "It's not uncommon to see a saturated country like the US take a breather after a spurt of growth," notes Inside Facebook. "However, some unusually interesting demographic trends took place for the country in June that add nuance to the overall growth number." In particular, a number of users in the prime …

With an emphasis on experimentation and community engagement, YouTube is partnering with two Oscar-winning directors to create a feature-length documentary about "ordinary" lives over the course of one day. "Every day, 6.7 billion people view the world through their own unique lens," explains the YouTube blog. "Imagine if there was a way to collect all of these perspectives, to aggregate and mold them into the cohesive story of a single day on earth." On July 24, willing community members will have 24 hours to film a snippet of their lives, which they are then encouraged to upload to …

Forget "horse-boy." Google and the users of its virtual viewing tools have moved on to divine revelations. Yep, Jesus Christ revealed himself to a twenty-six-year-old man from England who -- for reasons unknown -- was recently using Google Earth to browse rural farmland near Puspokladany, Hungary. "I'm not a religious person looking for images of Mary or Jesus in everything," Evans told The Sun. "But this is obvious." Asks BlackBook.com: "Just some oddly grown crops or some careful photoshopping on a fanatical Google employee's part? Who knows." If nothing else, the celestial citing illustrates the degree to which …

Looking for a competitive advantage over Google, Apple is busy studying the buying habits of many of its 150 million iTunes users to show more suitable mobile ads, Bloomberg reports. Examining consumers' entertainment and software purchases may give Apple an advantage in the burgeoning mobile ad space, Rachel Pasqua, director of mobile at marketing firm iCrossing, tells Bloomberg. "Apple knows what you've downloaded, how much time you spend interacting with applications and knows even what you've downloaded, don't like and deleted," said Pasqua. With Apple iAd mobile ad program, which debuted last week, the tech giant can …