Not a chance.

In fact, 2008 will see a ton of activity. With major media companies such as Disney, Viacom and Turner betting big bucks on virtual worlds for kids and young people, the market will continue to grow.

As Sibley Verbeck of Electric Sheep Co. told ClickZ, “The kid’s space is exploding.” Good for him, since his company’s SL business has foundered.

Virtual worlds operate at the sweet spot between gaming (hugely popular with children and tweens) and social networking (teens and young adults). They have the potential to draw huge audiences from both demographics.

Now, if only Webkinz would let my kid log in and register her new pet. Yesterday the site’s servers were down.

Which brings me to this article in Forbes. According to data in the article from Adonomics, which tracks installs and users of widgets, there are 100,000 companies worldwide developing widgets. Widgets and applications already in use — such as FunWall, Super Wall and Scrabulous — have a combined market value of $374 million, the article says.

Of course, Adonomics — owned by Altura Ventures, the “first Facebook-only VC,” according to its Web site — would naturally want to promote the widget marketplace to the fullest.

But even at half that market value, this fledgling widget/application economy is looking pretty robust. Now, it’s up to the developers to find concrete ways to monetize all those Zombie downloads.

Meanwhile, some unscrupulous application developers are tricking people into installing apps they don’t want. Facebook is trying to stop this behavior, according to a post on its Developer Blog.

And a Facebook app called Secret Crush reportedly tricks users into downloading adware to their computer. This is particularly worrisome because Facebook members routinely install apps on a whim, without knowing much or anything about the developers behind them. As Fortinet states in its description of the rogue app: “In a digital world where web traffic equals money, such a user base attracts spammers, virus/spyware seeders, and other ethic-less online marketers like honey would attract flies.”

If Facebook doesn’t stop all of this activity in its tracks, the app business will be in big trouble.

UPDATE: Zango, the advertising company named by Fortinet in the “Secret Crush” investigation, is denying any involvement with the matter.

In the social networking realm, Piper projects that sites such as MySpace and Facebook will continue to suck time and pageviews from other sites, but that ad CPMs for SN sites and user-gen sites in general will remain low due to huge inventory (i.e., untargeted remnant banner ads), consumers’ lack of interest in the ads and advertisers’ concerns about the content.

One bright note for social networking, Kessler believes, is the ad targeting plans that the two major sites are working on. MySpace’s HyperTargeting has shown CPM lifts of 50%.

Kessler left out a key piece of the SN revenue puzzle: search. Already, search accounts for 30% of MySpace’s revenue, according to a presentation that Fox Interactive Media’s Michael Barrett gave at last month’s UBS media conference.

When CEO Jerry Yang got on the stage on Monday to announce a few sketchy details of the Yahoo! Life initiative (not truly a working name, by the way), he said, “At Yahoo we want to be most essential starting point for your life.” Hmm, sounds familiar. Let’s wind back the Internet time clock to 1996:

“My Yahoo! puts our users in control, allowing them to receive personally relevant information when they want it.” - Jeff Mallett, Yahoo! SVP business operations, July 1996

The press release goes on to note one additional feature: “With My Agent, users can discover music, movies, and books that match their interests, and communicate with others who share similar tastes.”

The Yahoo! Life initiative puts email at the center, making it more relevant by prioritizing mail from important people. And by opening up its platform to third-party developers, Yahoo! says it will be able to display widgets that pop up when you mouse over certain words in email messages.

OK, sure, the technologies are updated and the content is widgified and the email-as-the-center-of-your-social-network idea is worth exploring, but I honestly don’t see much that’s totally new here. Do you?

It’s not clear from the article if this figure is simply including advertising placements on widgets or if it includes the money marketers will spend to create widgets and applications to promote their own brands and properties.

With widgets promoting movies becoming the norm for entertainment companies and even Hellman’s mayonnaise getting into the act, this could be a big ad business indeed.

Gaia Online gets $12mm venture round. Investors this time include Sony (a previous investor) and Time Warner. What intrigues me the most about Gaia these days is that the teen-oriented VW has been building its audience by using a widget on Bebo. Bebo members can sign on to Gaia and play a trimmed-down version of Gaia right from Bebo (via VentureBeat).

MTV extends its video syndication play. New artners include iMeem, Veoh and Dailymotion, joining existing partners AOL, Bebo, Joost, MSN and Comcast’s Fancast. MTV will handle ad sales, giving a cut of revenue to the video sites. And because MTV will allow its video clips to be widgetized, it will also gain revenue when its content is picked up by individuals and placed on their blogs, social network profile pages, etc. (via MediaPost)

Usage of video sites growing exponentially among young adults. According to a new Pew Internet & American Life Project survey (conducted in October-December 2007), 48% of US adult Internet users have ever visited a video site such as YouTube, up from 33% a year ago. 15% did so “yesterday” - i.e., the day before they were surveyed. That’s up from 8% a year ago.

Among people ages 18-29, 70% had ever visited a video site, up from 55% a year ago. And 30% said they had done so yesterday, double the 15% from a year ago.

As video proliferates across the Web (thanks to syndication deals such as MTV’s and the ease of spreading video virally by using widget technology) these figures will continue to rise.

Still, I was surprised to call them at 7:45 on Sunday evening for our weekly chat and hear that they were watching the Mark Zuckerberg interview on 60 Minutes. In fact, my dad didn’t even get on the phone until the interview was over.

There has been a lot of talk about this momentous occasion, and how this was Facebook’s unveiling for the CBS generation. The interview opened with Lesley Stahl setting up her own Facebook page and - amazing! - getting a friend request from an old acquaintance within minutes. The skeptic in me says it was a setup, but who knows.

I think Zuckerberg played the part well - awkward at times, passionate at others, overly mawkish at still others (saying the company needs to make money because it has 400 employees to pay? not the most compelling explanation of their ad strategy).

Will there be a spike in Facebook usage among 50- and 60-somethings? Perhaps. I can’t wait to see what they think of Vampires and SuperPoking. But Scrabulous, well, now that’s a pretty natural fit.

The latest dustup? Some Hitwise figures announcing that MySpace had a 72% market share of US visits to social networking sites in December 2007 — well above Facebook’s 16% share.

TechCrunch jumped into the fray with some numbers from comScore showing that MySpace had 69 million US unique visitors in December vs. Facebook’s 35 million — giving it not nearly as big a lead as the Hitwise numbers indicate. In page views, TechCrunch reported, MySpace’s 38 billion trounced Facebook’s 13 billion.

TechCrunch also reported — breathlessly — that worldwide comScore figures showed that Facebook had surpassed MySpace in minutes spent on the site — 21 billion to MySpace’s 17 billion.

MySpace, meanwhile, sent out a press release touting the Hitwise numbers and figures from NetRatings (yet a third measurement service) showing that

“MySpace leads in the “Loyalty Matrix” (time spent per person combined with visits per person). During the month of December the average user spent over two hours and fifteen minutes on MySpace.”

A couple of things to note here: First, page views are a distorting metric. In a time when so many sites are using Ajax, they’re becoming less and less important as a measure of true activity.

Second, time spent is also a vague measure. For one thing, Facebook’s site has become one of the slowest loading sites around (thanks to all those apps cluttering people’s pages). And plenty of people keep Facebook open in one browser tab while they do other things online. So unless comScore’s numbers measure active engagement with the site (something the company is in fact working on), the time spent metric is also flawed.

Maybe marketers, like me, are saving all of their energy for the Super Bowl. I had a vague feeling that I wasn’t hearing a lot about the spots that would appear during the big game, and I guess I was right.

According to analysis by Cymfony discussed in a ClickZ news article, this year’s Super Bowl advertisers are doing a lot less pre-game publicity for their advertising. Says Jim Nail of Cymfony: “the volume of traditional online discussion and media coverage is a lot lower than last year.”

According to a briefing Jim gave me in December as part of my work for eMarketer, marketers that hope for post-game discussion in the blogs may be disappointed: 78% of the total volume of Super Bowl ad discussion happened in the three days following the game.

However, and this is important for those of you who pay attention to social media, in last year’s game the traditional media coverage that happened before the game played an integral role in spurring online conversation after the game. In fact, advertisers that released their ad prior to the game ended up with up to five times as much coverage and discussion AFTER the game.

So, what’s holding this year’s crop of marketers back? ClickZ says it may be that UGC, such a buzzword during last year’s game (see: Doritos), is a been-there, done-that. But surely a few marketers have something interesting up their sleeves. So, let’s get this game started!

In the meantime, Cymfony’s Super Bowl Advertisers blog has a running commentary on the latest news.