Believe it or not, some people feel a small “publishing platform and social network” is a good thing to sink money into at this point.  Tumblr, which was founded last year by David Karp, claims to see over 15 million unique visitors per month, and Karp said in a statement, “After running a very lean company, with a core team of three this past year, this new capital presents some fascinating opportunities to grow the business and prove a sustainable model.  We’ll also be giving a considerable amount of attention to refining Tumblr as a developer platform.  It’s become very clear that our community is taking our product much further than we’d be able to on our own.”

Flickr users who also own smart phones are going to be doing happy dances. A new version of the Flickr site designed for mobile phones has been launched, and it’ll allow people to view videos in addition to still photos. A post on Yodel Anecdotal also notes, “The new m.flickr.com sports a sleek new interface that makes it significantly easier to view your photostream and sets, and puts recent activity (yours and your contacts’) front and center.”

Canadians who want to use Twitter while on the move are not going to be happy.  It seems the company has been squeezed by high SMS costs, and as a result, a post on the Twitter Status blog states, “[E]ffective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode.”  Twitter is at least looking for alternative solutions, and you should feel free to complain to its former providers.

It’s time to zoom out again and look at social networking as something of a whole.  Turns out, it’s a good thing.  A new study sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “found that youths use online networks to extend friendships, acquire technical skills, learn from each other, explore interests and develop expertise,” according to Sharon Noguchi.  So Facebook it up – or let your children do so – without worrying that time spent on the site will do anyone harm.

It figured that Microsoft would enter the social scene sooner or later; there’s hardly a thing the company doesn’t try its hand at these days.  However, the surprising thing is that a Windows Live update actually looks pretty good.  Address books can be imported from Facebook, and partners include other big Web 2.0 sites like Flickr, Twitter, and Yelp.  Don’t count on this redesign overthrowing MySpace in the next two weeks (it won’t even be fully rolled out until the beginning of next year), but it should bring in some new users and make old ones pretty happy.

Mark your calendars for November 22nd.  Although no one’s quite sure how it would handle questions relating to revenue and censorship, there’s a rumor that YouTube will launch a live streaming option sometime that Saturday.  Nicholas Carlson, who covered the rumor, writes, “One possibility that we feel Google shareholders should root for: YouTube will launch live streaming as a service for paying customers only.”

YouTube videos tend not to test a person’s attention span; two to three minutes of some comedy show or music video is quite manageable.  Still, there are times when whatever you really want to see (or want somebody else to see) is buried a little ways within a clip, and for these moments, YouTube’s now allowing users to “deep link” to a specific point.  Just stick “#t=1m15s” (or whatever number of minutes and seconds you want) at the end of a video’s URL, and you’ll be all set.

Rather than touch on any specific site this week, let’s just look at the overall social media ecosystem.  In short: it’s in great shape.  A new report from Forrester states that a full 75 percent of American adults are using social tools this year, as opposed to just 57 percent in 2007.  Given this fantastic rate of growth, we might well top out within a very short amount of time.  (It must be assumed that some of the oldest and poorest people will never climb aboard).

It seems that Facebook is becoming a lot more interesting for both users and developers.  From the user perspective, a whole bunch of fascinating applications are on the way.  As for developers, the fbFund just awarded the 25 teams that created the applications $25,000 each.  An additional contest round will see the prize levels reach $225,000.  Expect to see some top talent and a lot of random people drawn to the social network as a result.

While old Monty Python clips are as funny as ever, there’s much more serious stuff going on in the world, and YouTube’s doing its best to acknowledge the situation.  A fresh version of the site’s YourMoney channel, for example, “is YouTube’s one-stop destination for expert financial insight,” according to a post on the YouTube Blog.  Bank of America helped build the channel, and as a bonus, it offers a customizable Google Finance gadget.

You know how it (sometimes) goes: you watch a YouTube video, an overlay ad appears, you ignore the ad, and your day continues as scheduled.  Except it seems that YouTube may soon get a little more forceful; according to Liz Gannes, the site will show post-roll video ads to users who don’t click on the overlays.  What’s good for these users and bad for YouTube and its advertisers is that there’s no reason for the average person to stick around.

Facebook is known more for wasting people’s time than changing the world.  The social network is at least taking one step in that second direction, though, with its new focus on getting people to vote.  In addition to allowing users register to vote through a page on the site, ads will make the effort more visible.  And a post on the Facebook Blog states, “We’re proud to announce that in the few hours since launching this initiative, thousands of users have registered to vote through Facebook.”  Not bad at all.

“Up, up, and away” might not quite cover it; the latest stats about Twitter make Superman look like a weakling.  According to Adam Ostrow‘s report on Nielsen Online data, Twitter attracted a unique audience in August 2008 that was 419 percent larger than the one it had pulled in twelve months earlier.  The average time any given person spent on the site increased by 55 percent during the same period.  At these rates, Twitter’s on track to grow really big, really fast.

The world’s most popular video-sharing site has become a little less violent.  Now banned from YouTube are any videos that “directly incite violence” or “encourage other users to violate the Terms of Use.”  Google’s lawyers and/or policymakers haven’t admitted as much, but the decision appears to trace back to a push by Senator Joe Lieberman to have terrorists’ recruitment and training videos removed.

Online television isn’t exactly omnipresent, but it is at least gaining round.  A new press release from The Conference Board and TNS claims that “[n]early one-fifth of American households who use the internet watch television broadcasts online, double the viewership from 2006.”  Hulu and The WB are already here; look for big companies and advertisers to continue taking advantage of this trend to the best of their abilities.