I recently had a chance to talk to Chris Winfield, CEO of Blueglass -- a new integrated marketing company combining social, search, and other online capabilities -- about current and emerging trends in social media. Our conversation touched on an issue that has been on my mind, and in the news, more and more over the last year: how advertisers can limit their dependence on social networks and other third-party social media players by fostering more direct relationships with their target audiences.

The Internet is good, according to a survey of 895 "technology stakeholders," pundits, and other experts by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center, inquiring about the effects of email, social networks, and other social media. Specifically, a large majority of respondents (85%) agreed that, "In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the Internet has mostly been a positive force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future." But what about …

Reporters tend to be obsessed with novelty -- what's new, hot, fresh, innovative, surprising, catastrophic, etc. This preoccupation is understandable: I mean, our business is called "news." But there's equal importance in things that don't change -- equilibrium instead of trend, static versus dynamic, solid out of ephemeral. On that note, I recently found myself thinking about World of Warcraft, the pioneering massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMPORG for short. It turns out WoW has more or less plateaued ... as one of the biggest businesses on the Web.

I missed this yesterday, probably because Microsoft wanted me to: less than two months after launch -- and only after a very expensive, high-profile advertising campaign -- they're pulling the plug on Kin, which they'd touted as the first "social media phone." The demise of Kin (insert "next of Kin" joke here) contains a couple of lessons, but to my mind the most important one is this: social media is not something people are willing to pay for. It has to be free... and therefore ad-supported.

Undeterred by the privacy debacle attending the debut of Google Buzz, Google appears to be preparing another sally into the world of social media, if a number of well-informed online rumormongers are to be believed, beginning with Digg founder Kevin Rose. The new service, which might be named "Google Me" (I'm going to go ahead and make that GoogleMe for Web style points) seems to be positioned as a competitor to Facebook. Because making predictions is always fun, I am going to guess that this new service, whatever its name, goes nowhere. And yes, I actually have reasons for thinking …

Apparently April showers bring May-June overviews: There has been a remarkable spate of research about social networks over the last two months, and it shows no signs of abating as we move into summer. The latest study, the "2010 Social Networking Report" from Experian Simmons has some interesting findings about the who, what, and why of current social networking behavior -- but perhaps most interesting is the where factor.

Social network advertising clearly has a bright future, and the prospects for future growth were confirmed by a new forecast from Borrell Associates, which predicts massive growth in ad revenues this year. Overall the Borrell report, "The Social Networking Explosion: Ad Revenue Outlook" has social network ad spending increasing 68% from $4 billion in 2009 to $7.5 billion in 2010, then continuing to grow every year to about $38 billion in 2015. The 2015 figure will represent approximately a third of all U.S. online marketing spending. My only question is: Where is this ad spending going to happen?

So, the blogosphere has been roiled over the last week by a single controversial tweet -- the announcement of the execution of convicted murderer Ronnie Gardner by the attorney general of Utah, Mark Shurtleff, who tweeted to his 7,000 followers on June 18: "I just gave the go ahead to the Corrections Department to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims." Gardner was then executed by a five-man firing squad. Around that time "firing squad" was a top-trending topic on Twitter.

Amid growing controversy over privacy breaches and new marketing initiatives from Facebook and others, the annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference has drawn up a 14-point "Bill of Rights" for social network users which was published on Tuesday. The Bill of Rights says a lot about how bad the situation has become: It's kind of pathetic that CFP should even have to include "allow me to delete my account," for example.

Microsoft is rolling out some interesting new features for its Bing iPhone app, which have the potential to totally change the search experience for users by incorporating content from their friends' Twitter and Facebook accounts into search results. This is obviously a cool new capability -- but I can also foresee some potential problems arising if marketers try to combine this function with social commerce.