Social networking website Facebook and Internet telephone company Skype are in talks to establish a partnership that is aimed at integrating their communication services, the Wall Street Journal said, citing a person familiar with the situation.

  Under the proposed partnership, Facebook users would be able to sign into Skype through their Facebook Connect accounts, the Journal said.

Once signed in, the users would be able to send text messages, voice chat and video chat with their Facebook friends from within Skype, according to the paper.

  The integrated functions are built into Skype’s 5.0 version, which is expected to be released in the next few weeks, the person told the paper.

  Enabling Skype’s voice and video chat on Facebook would be a “logical progression” to the partnership, the person told the paper.

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Despite some skepticism about America’s appetite for purchasing digital virtual goods in games and on the internet, the “virtual goods” market is growing at a healthy clip, according to an industry report issued Tuesday.

The research group Inside Network says the U.S. virtual goods market will hit $2.1 billion in 2011, up from $1.6 billion this year.

The group, which also owns a blog about Facebook, attributes much of the growth in that market to social online games like “FarmVille.”

“One of the biggest trends we see in the technology industry in general right now is the growth of social gaming, and how it already has become nearly a billion-dollar market itself just in the past couple of years, primarily on the Facebook platform,” said Justin Smith, founder of Inside Network.

Inside Network released a summary of its report to CNN in advance of its release on Tuesday but would not make the full text of its report public.

Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the size of the virtual goods market is difficult to define and that, in general, purchase of online and digital goods is still outside the mainstream.

“There are a few companies doing this very well and executing this very well, so by the time you factor in ‘World of Warcraft’ and one or two others, then you’ve probably got a fair chunk of the market,” he said. “There are not hundreds and hundreds of companies doing this well.”

One problem for the industry, Thomas said, is that only 1 to 2 percent of people who play social games actually purchase goods to keep playing.

Generally, players can opt to buy digital goods and equipment that will help them play a game more successfully, or they could log more hours in the game to earn those bonuses and power-ups. The term virtual goods refers to digital items that are purchased for use online, in games and on mobile phones.

Online news stories could be considered virtual goods in the loosest sense, Thomas said, since some people will pay for an article that does not exist — or at least is not tangible — in the real world.

Inside Network, which based its analysis on dozens of interviews with companies and investors involved in the virutal goods market, says it includes the following areas in its analysis: social games, online free-to-play games, virtual worlds, mobile games, and purchases made through console gaming systems.

Mainstream media companies would be smart to watch the development of the virtual goods market, Thomas said.

“The big media companies are rightly trying to keep on top of emerging trends,” he said. “Whatever’s hot for consumers, they should be on top of and try to understand.”

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Facebook is working with mobile phone maker INQ Mobile Ltd to create two smartphone devices that may have a network tie up with AT&T, Bloomberg said, citing three people familiar with the matter.

The smartphones would carry the popular social networking website’s services and were set to be unveiled in Europe in the first half of 2011 and the United States in the second half of the year, the report said.

Privately held Facebook said previously that it was not building its own mobile phone. Jaime Schopflin, a spokesman for Facebook, said the company’s current projects included “deeper integrations with some manufacturers.”

AT&T, the No. 2 US mobile provider, is still thinking about whether it should be the network carrier for the Facebook smartphones and has not yet made a deal, Bloomberg said.

None of the companies could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters outside of regular US business hours.

Facebook declined to comment to Bloomberg on plans for specific phones. The company, however, told the agency that it continues to work with INQ Mobile, which has previously sold phones with Facebook features, along with other companies.

INQ Mobile, which is based in London and is backed by Hong Kong telecom firm Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, declined to comment to Bloomberg.

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Watch your backs Facebook and Twitter. Google is coming for you and it looks like they’re playing for keeps. Tongue’s were wagging as the search engine rolled out yet another addition to the expansive Google empire. Google Buzz is the company’s definitive entry into the social media arena.

According to Google’s official blog:

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most.”

Taking a page from social media content aggregator FriendFeed, Buzz takes status updates, photos, and other content from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites and streams them through your Gmail account. Just like the big boys, Buzz allows users to “Like” a piece of content as well as comment. It also gives recommendations on content you might like based on your friends’ activities. Buzz will also provide suggestions on follow-worthy people based on conversations friends might be having with the person as well as your own feedback. The more you click the “interested” or “not interested” buttons, the better Google Buzz will become with giving quality recommendations. Conversely, it will also use this system to eliminate the content you’re not interested in like spam or someone’s out of touch rant on why Google Wave will revolutionize the web.

In addition to being integrated into your Gmail account, Buzz can also be accessed via cell phone. Buzz Mobile will take a page from Foursquare, Yelp, and the like and use your GPS to update your followers on your current location. Google has already rolled out an app for Blackberry and iPhone users, but it can also be accessed in Google Maps. You can also post photos and comments in the Google Maps version as evidenced by Google’s example of a user posting a picture of a minor accident. Another cool feature is the integration of Google Voice. Using Voice, you can simple speak your update instead of aggravating that thumb injury you’ve sustained from over-texting.

Google Buzz has already started popping up in users’ Gmail accounts and everyone should have it over the next few days.

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Facebook officially denied they have any plan to charge users monthly in response to the current rumours.  It is widely spread that Facebook will start charging users from US$4.99 to US$14.99 per month.  Although Facebook denied they have plans to charge users, it is interesting to see what Facebook will do in order to generate huge profits from their large user base.  Monthly fee? Charges applied to Facebook Fan pages or business groups?  Let’s see.
The following is presented by Facebook:
“A false rumour suggesting that Facebook is to start charging is being used to bait malware traps.

Thousands of disgruntled punters, angry at the $4.99 a month charge for using the social networking site that will supposedly kick in from June (or July, according to other …false reports) have been induced to visit “protest group” sites in response to spam emails.

However, in reality, there is no such plan and the protest pages often contain malware, as urban myth debunking site Snopes warns: “The protest page was a trap for the unwary; clicking on certain elements of it initiated a script that hijacked users’ computers. Some of those who did venture a click had their computers taken over by a series of highly objectionable images while malware simultaneously attempted to install itself onto their computers.”

Snopes published its warning on 31 December, but groups on Facebook itself protesting the supposed upcoming charges remain active almost two weeks later. A quick check on one such UK group contains no scripting unpleasantness directly, but it does link to numerous third-party sites whose provenance remains suspect.

Searching for “Facebook charges July 2010″ leads to fake blog entries as well as some legitimate results, evidence of an ongoing black hat SEO campaign of a type commonly used to punt rogue security scanner software over recent months. We asked Facebook what steps it intended to take, if any, against groups spreading the false rumour and will update this story as and when we hear more.”

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A 48-hour-old fundraising campaign to help Haiti earthquake victims, done solely through text messages, was already stunning Red Cross officials on Thursday when it hit $3 million. By Friday morning, the tally had more than doubled. (notes: Please still help those victims online and offline)

The campaign, made viral on networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, had raised $8 million by Friday, according to a Twitter message from the White House that was reposted on the Red Cross account. The campaign leads a spate of online efforts that have allowed people to help victims of the devastating quake.

The Red Cross campaign’s tally would be double the $4 million that was donated to all charities by mobile texts in all of 2009, a spokeswoman said.  Abi Weaver, spokeswoman for the Red Cross, confirmed that the mobile giving campaign hit the $7 million mark about 11 p.m. Thursday.  “It’s shattered any record that we’ve seen with mobile giving before,” Wendy Harman, social media manager for the Red Cross, said Thursday.  Friday morning, “Red Cross” was among the 10 most popular topics on Twitter.

Many celebrities, including singer Adam Lambert, actor Ben Stiller, cyclist Lance Armstrong and actress Lindsay Lohan, used their Twitter feeds to plead for earthquake-relief donations.  “Yele haiti now for the disaster,” Lohan tweeted Wednesday, referring to musician Wyclef Jean’s online earthquake relief fund. “Please do all that you can. Please.” Yele Haiti also has launched a text message fundraising campaign.

Armstrong, an active Twitter user with more than 2.3 million followers, posted that his Livestrong Foundation had pledged $250,000 to humanitarian aid groups.

The online classified site Craigslist posted a list of relief organizations, including Medecins sans Frontieres and CARE, along with links via which users can donate.

Multiple Facebook groups related to Haiti had been created by Thursday. One of the largest, Earthquake Haiti, had nearly 170,000 members. Many Facebook users also were changing their status updates to reflect when they’d donated to the Red Cross campaign, thus encouraging their friends to do likewise.

Earlier Thursday, when the Red Cross topped $3 million in text and social media donations — it hit nearly $40 million from all sources by late Thursday — spokesman Jonathan Aiken described it as “a phenomenal number that’s never been achieved before.”

“People text up to three times at 10 bucks a pop,” Aiken said. “You’re talking about roughly 300,000 people actually spontaneously deciding, ‘I can spare $10 for this.’ And that’s remarkable.”

As of late Thursday, more than half of all donations to the Red Cross’s Haiti relief effort had been received online, according to a news release. Harman said the Red Cross has been active on Twitter since the California wildfires of 2007.

The organization also has accounts on Facebook, Flickr and YouTube as well as its own blog, and hosts an online newsroom that provides updates on the organization’s disaster responses. She said the Red Cross has “a pretty robust social media strategy” but that the Haiti response is unprecedented.  “It feels like every person who has a Twitter account has tweeted about it, which is a pretty amazing thing to see,” she said.

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