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Hope you don’t mind Viacom getting a good idea of your likes and dislikes.  As a way of moving a $1 billion copyright infringement case forward, a judge has ruled that YouTube must share records of who has watched what (including IP addresses and user login names) with the media corporation.  The only slightly comforting thing is that Viacom is supposed to use the info only for proving the pervasiveness of privacy.

If MySpace users want to share their personal information with other sites, the social network’s finally ready to let them do so.  As everything’s operating on an opt-in basis, privacy concerns seem to have been addressed, and it’s now pretty much up to developers to make the sharing of information seem appealing to users.  Facebook, meanwhile, has yet to provide any similar options.

YouTube’s ready to develop beyond a place where people watch short videos of random individuals kicking each other in the crotch.  Within the new Screening Room, quality clips made by real filmmakers (and often lasting more than ten minutes) are being put on display.  These aren’t the full-length television episodes and Hollywood movies that can be seen elsewhere, but sites like Hulu still might want to watch out.

Not to be “all Twitter, all the time,” but this week, two more Twitter-related stories seem worth mentioning. First, the company is bringing in professionals from Pivotal Labs to help solve its downtime problems. Second, Twitter’s CEO has said no pay models will be put in place. So we’re looking at something that’s free and actually works . . . good news all around.

All work and no play may result in dullness, but all work and all play is liable to result in insanity.  So Twitter is “adding the ability for users to separate their contacts into groups, support for sending and receiving messages by e-mail, and adding new instant-message and Internet channels for the service,” according to what Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Mitch Wagner.  Sounds nifty, although reliable uptime would be a better present.

YouTube’s hugely popular, and has been for a long time.  The real news here relates to money.  Forbes reports, “[I]t appears that YouTube will generate $200 million this year and maybe $350 million the next.”  Those two totals don’t add up to $1.65 billion, of course, but they suggest that Google is getting the hang of managing its star video-sharing site.

Oft-repeated rumor has it that $15 million in funding will soon wind up in Twitter’s corporate pocket.  In fact, some reports have it landing there already.  But regardless of the timeframe, Peter Kafka reports that Spark Capital is the likely source of the investment, and the money should put Twitter at an overall value of around $80 million.  Maybe now the site will actually stay up for a week at a time.

If you’ve ever put a video on YouTube and wondered about the people who watched it, Google’s trying to answer at least a few questions with its new YouTube Insight tool.  Users will be able to look at data related to geographic regions, time, and any video’s overall category to see what they’re doing right and wrong.  “As for now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the ‘About this Video’ button under ‘My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos,” a post on the YouTube Blog states.

Earlier today, there were rumors that both Google and News Corp might have been bidding for Blinkx, and the company’s stock shot up as a result. Blinkx officials have since said that they aren’t aware of any offers, however, and so things are returning to normal. Still, Blinkx (and the video-sharing space as a whole) will bear watching over the next few weeks.

A new YouTube player is arriving (for at least some people), and although it’s not revolutionary, some mildly clever revisions have been made.  The most significant may be the option (marked by the words “watch in higher quality” or “watch in standard quality”) to change between different versions of videos.  Keyboard shortcuts have also been enabled, and there’s a slight visual update, as well.

Like it or not, applications are a big part of what we’ll call “the Facebook experience,” and starting today, MySpace is exposing users to them, as well.  Josh Catone reports, “MySpace officially opened its Application Gallery to all users . . . after launching it in public beta last March.  In that time over 1,000 applications have been approved and added to the gallery and there have been over 2.1 million application installs across the site.”  There’s no word on whether anything involving sheep-tossing is available.

Maybe you use Blinkx, DailyMotion, or any of the dozen other popular video-sharing sites (including Google’s own YouTube).  But Google Video’s been updated, and a few different layout options - along the ability to show what videos have been popular in the past - makes it a little more unique.  Also, even if rolling Google Video into YouTube seems like a logical thing to do, the company’s promised to make separate Google Video updates for at least a little while.

Flickr’s taken another step forward, only to many onlookers, it appears that the site’s foot landed in a bog.  The idea of video on Flickr hasn’t been a hit so far, with groups opposing the idea being much larger (or at least more active and vocal) than those that like it.  Flickr’s not budging yet, though, so users may have to either get used to it or pick a new photo-sharing service.

Here’s a bit of good news for everyone trying to avoid Vista: Bill Gates said, “Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version. . . .  I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways.”  But it remains to be seen whether Gates was referring to some sort of test version, or if the CEO, who will be leaving the company, was even right in any general sense.

Details are still scarce, but according to an official site, the Rockstar Social Club is “coming very soon.”  It appears that typical social network features will be connected to games like the upcoming Grand Theft Auto release, and full-fledged social networks or MMOs may ensue.  Wagner James Au has a bit more information; there’s no telling what this development might do to social networking’s reputation, but it would certainly make things a lot more interesting.